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Decoding Nondelegation After Gundy: What The Experience In State Courts Tells Us About What To Expect When We're Expecting, Daniel E. Walters Feb 2022

Decoding Nondelegation After Gundy: What The Experience In State Courts Tells Us About What To Expect When We're Expecting, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine theoretically limits Congress’s ability to delegate legislative powers to the executive agencies that make up the modern administrative state. Yet, in practice, the U.S. Supreme Court has, since the New Deal, shied away from enforcing any limits on congressional delegation. That may change in the near future. In Gundy v. United States, the Court narrowly upheld a delegation, and a dissent signaled deep doubts about the Court’s longstanding “intelligible principle” standard and offered a new framework to replace it. Subsequent events strongly suggest that the Court is poised to move in the direction contemplated by the dissent …


The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference’S Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters Jan 2019

The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference’S Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agen­cies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doc­trine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-com­ment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is neces­sary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doc­trine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting agency power and violating core separation of pow­ers norms in the process. The claim that Auer perversely encourages agencies to “self-delegate”—that is, to create vague rules that can later be informally interpreted by agencies with latitude due to judicial defer­ence—has helped …