Law Commons^™

Biden, Bennet, And Bipartisan Federal Judicial Selection, Carl Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

"The U.S. Constitution plainly assigns to the Senate the profound duties of rendering critical advice and consent related to all specific federal judicial nominees whom the President selects. The dynamic roles of senators who directly represent jurisdictions where vacant posts materialize have perennially been crucial to appropriately discharging these essential responsibilities. Senators identify excellent candidates—individuals who possess diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, independence, experience, and ideology, as well as the character and measured judicial temperament to be exceptional jurists—assemble complete applications, comprehensively review the prospects, and interview choices whom the senators duly recommend to the President. After …

Whither Rationality?, Shi-Ling Hsu

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health. By Michael A. Livermore and Richard L. Revesz.

Dismantling The Wall, Charles Shane Ellison, Anjum Gupta

Michigan Law Review Online

In this Essay, we will summarize the status quo of this crisis. We will highlight warning signs that began to appear even before the Trump Administration to understand how we reached this point. We will then propose solutions to chart a pathway forward, exploring strategies for implementing lasting reforms aimed at tearing down this administrative wall and replacing it with a more fair and welcoming system.

Evaporating Into Thin Air: The Prosecution Of Air Pollution Crimes During The Trump Administration, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Antagonistic to environmental regulation, the Trump Administration sought to significantly roll back federal clean air law enforcement. Yet, we know very little about the impact of the Administration on air pollution criminal enforcement. Through content analysis of all EPA criminal investigations leading to prosecution, we analyze patterns in charging and sentencing and draw out the broader themes in air pollution prosecutions during this period. Our results show a sizable drop in prosecutions compared to the Obama Administration. Although prosecutors managed to pursue serious crimes involving significant harm and criminal conduct and secure over $2.9 billion in monetary penalties, roughly 160 …

Structured To Fail: Lessons From The Trump Administration’S Faulty Pandemic Planning And Response, Alejandro E. Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that poorly designed government can be a matter of life and death. This article explains how the Administration’s careless and delayed response to the crisis was made immeasurably worse by its confused and confusing reallocation of authority to perform or supervise tasks essential to reducing the virus’s ravages.

After exploring the rationale for and impact of prior federal reorganizations responding to public health crises, the article shows how a combination of unnecessary and unhelpful overlapping authority and a thoughtless mix of centralized and decentralized authority contributed to the …

The Ban And Its Enduring Bandwidth, Khaled Ali Beydoun

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Essay is a contribution the Michigan Journal of Race & Law’s special issue marking the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing War on Terror. It reflects on Executive Order 13769, widely known as the “Muslim Ban,” years after it was signed into law, as an extra-legal catalyst of state-sponsored and private Islamophobia that unfolded outside of the United States.

“We Are Asking Why You Treat Us This Way. Is It Because We Are Negroes?” A Reparations-Based Approach To Remedying The Trump Administration’S Cancellation Of Tps Protections For Haitians, Sarah E. Baranik De Alarcón, David H. Secor, Norma Fuentes-Mayorga

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article places the Trump Administration’s decision to cancel TPS for Haitians within the longer history of U.S. racism and exclusion against Haiti and Haitians, observes the legal challenges against this decision and their limitations, and imagines a future that repairs the harms caused by past and current racist policies. First, this Article briefly outlines the history of exclusionary, race-based immigration laws in the United States, and specifically how this legal framework, coupled with existing anti-Black ideologies in the United States, directly impacted Haitians and Haitian immigrants arriving in the United States. Next, the Article provides an overview of the …

The World Health Organization: A Weak Defender Against Pandemics, Chenglin Liu

Faculty Articles

Why did the World Health Organization (WHO) not act in a timely fashion to declare the coronavirus outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)? If it had done so, could the United States have heeded the warning and controlled the spread of the virus? Is the WHO's delay a factual cause of the calamities that the United States has suffered? This article addresses these questions. Part I examines the development of the WHO and its governance mechanism, major powers and limits, and past achievements and failures. It also explores how the WHO responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and …

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Trinity Lutheran, And Trumpism: Codifying Fiction With Administrative Gaslighting, Robin S. Maril

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This article addresses the Trump administration’s consistent misinterpretation and misapplication of legal precedent to support unnecessary religious exemptions that exceed Constitutional mandates and impair the rights of third parties to access federal services and programs. Proponents of this routinized repeal of civil rights protections argue that the Trump administration is merely restoring the correct balance of religious liberties in the federal government. However, the regulations and policies included in this campaign unconstitutionally broaden the already robust religious protections provided by statutes and court decisions and have the effect of dismantling the civil rights infrastructure of the past 50 years.

Despite …

A 6-3 Supreme Court Could Allow The Government To Openly Discriminate In Its Policies, Katherine A. Shaw, Leah Litman

Online Publications

Over the past few days, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenges to hot-button Trump administration policies involving the border wall, an attempt to exclude noncitizens from the census breakdown used for allocating seats in Congress and limits on who can apply for asylum from Mexico.

Back To The Future: Creating A Bipartisan Environmental Movement For The 21st Century, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth. To prevent greater public health threats and economic dislocation from climate disruption, which will disproportionately harm Black Americans, people of color, and indigenous people, this Comment argues that we need to restore the bipartisanship that fueled the environmental movement and that the fate of the planet—and our children and grandchildren—depends upon our collective action.

It Is Time To Get Back To Basics On The Border, Donna Coltharp

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

What A Difference A State Makes: California’S Authority To Regulate Motor Vehicle Emissions Under The Clean Air Act And The Future Of State Autonomy, Chiara Pappalardo

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Air pollutants from motor vehicles constitute one of the leading sources of local and global air degradation with serious consequences for human health and the overall stability of Earth’s climate. Under the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), for over fifty years, the state of California has served as a national “laboratory” for the testing of technological solutions and regulatory approaches to improve air quality. On September 19, 2019, the Trump Administration revoked California’s authority to set more stringent pollution emission standards. The revocation of California’s authority frustrates ambitious initiatives undertaken in California and in other states to reduce local air pollution …

Symposium: Pandemics And The Constitution: Positive Constitutionalism In A Pandemic: Demanding Responsibility From The Trump Administration, Ruthann Robson

ConLawNOW

We have become accustomed to conceiving of our constitutional rights as affording protection only against government infringement, but not as granting us any positive rights to claim government protection or action. The circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic should make us question this reflexive resort to negative constitutionalism. The numerous failures of the present federal Administration to ameliorate and address the pandemic are startling. Even under current doctrinal limits of negative rights, the Administration’s failures should give rise to individual constitutional claims. Most importantly, we should reorient our constitutional frameworks, theories, and doctrines toward recognition of positive rights to health and …

America’S Second-Class Children: An Examination Of President Trump’S Immigration Policies On Migrant Children And Inquiry On Justice Through The Catholic Perspective, Gabriel Sáenz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman

Michigan Law Review

Review of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories edited by Melissa Murray, Katherine Shaw, and Reva B. Siegel.

Why Should We Care About International Law?, Monica Hakimi

Michigan Law Review

Review of Harold Hongju Koh's The Trump Administration and International Law.

Filling The Illinois Federal District Court Vacancies, Carl Tobias

Pepperdine Law Review

President Donald Trump repeatedly argues that appellate court appointments constitute his major success. The President and the United States Senate Republican Party majority have established records by approving fifty very conservative, young, and capable appellate court jurists. However, their confirmations have exacted a toll, particularly from the many federal district courts which address seventy-nine unfilled positions in 677 judicial posts. One constructive illustration has been the three Illinois tribunals which confront five pressing openings. The Administrative Office of the United States Courts classifies three as “emergencies,” because the vacant seats have been protracted and involve substantial caseloads. Despite this circumstance, …

Lessons From The Coronavirus Pandemic For Environmental Governance, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This very short essay distills lessons from the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic for leaders everywhere about how—and how not—to manage complex interjurisdictional challenges, like the environment, which unfold without regard for political boundaries. In a matter of months, COVID-19 has laid bare the interdependence of the world on every front imaginable: global public health, economic growth and development, social and professional networks, transportation and migration, and of course, ecological and environmental systems. No single nation has the coronavirus. No one state is economically disrupted. There is no single ethnic group, occupation, or corner of the world that has …

The Science Of Administrative Change, Barry Sullivan, Christine Chabot

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to reduce regulation during the 2016 presidential campaign. Indeed, one of his key advisors promised to "deconstruct" the administrative state. Since taking office, President Trump has attempted to make good on his promises, spurring federal agencies to brush aside countless regulations that previous administrations had promulgated based on scientific, technological, or economic evidence. Those efforts, which have been dubbed a "war on science," implicate a long-contested question in administrative law: to what extent should a change in presidential administrations excuse agencies from an obligation to justify changes in policy with expert, reasoned analysis of relevant data? …

The Science Of Administrative Change, Christine Chabot, Barry Sullivan

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to reduce regulation during the 2016 presidential campaign. Indeed, one of his key advisors promised to "deconstruct" the administrative state. Since taking office, President Trump has attempted to make good on his promises, spurring federal agencies to brush aside countless regulations that previous administrations had promulgated based on scientific, technological, or economic evidence. Those efforts, which have been dubbed a "war on science," implicate a long-contested question in administrative law: to what extent should a change in presidential administrations excuse agencies from an obligation to justify changes in policy with expert, reasoned analysis of relevant data? …

New Environmental Crimes Project Data Shows That Pollution Prosecutions Plummeted During The First Two Years Of The Trump Administration, David M. Uhlmann

Other Publications

The latest data from the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School shows a dramatic drop in pollution prosecutions during the first two years under President Donald J. Trump. The data, which now includes 14 years of cases from 2005–2018, shows a 70 percent decrease in Clean Water Act prosecutions under President Trump, as well as a more than 50 percent decrease in Clean Air Act prosecutions. The data again shows that most defendants charged with pollution crime commit misconduct involving one or more of the aggravating factors identified in my previous scholarship, so prosecutors continue to …

‘Warming Up’ To Sustainable Procurement, Steven L. Schooner, Markus Speidel

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Procurement professionals will play a critical role in the belated but necessary effort to slow the pace of climate change. That critical, evolved role will lie in sustainable procurement, which, if effectively implemented, will dramatically alter markets and fundamentally change purchasing behaviors. To be effective, procurement professionals will need to rethink how we define our profession, assess our outcomes, and bring value to our government customers. Successfully establishing a sustainable procurement regime will require dramatic change, including, among other things, overcoming the persistent tyranny of low price, understanding and adopting lifecycle costing, considering externalities in the value proposition, and, of …

Lawful Permanent Residency: A Potential Solution For Temporary Protected Status Holders In The Eastern District Of New York, Cody M. Gecht

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Emerging Policy And Practice Issues (2019), Steven L. Schooner

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper/chapter, presented at the Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2019), attempts to identify the key evolving trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement for 2019-2020 and beyond. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity. This year's paper discusses, among other things, the high degree of uncertainty currently being experienced in the public procurement sphere, dramatic increases to the micro-purchase and simplified acquisition thresholds, the work of the Congressionally-mandated Section 809 …

Of Mosquitoes And "Moral Convictions" In The Age Of Zika: How The Trump Administration's Gutting Of The Affordable Care Act's Contraceptive Mandate Jeopardizes Women's And Children's Health, Linda C. Fentiman

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

The Trump Administration’s efforts to undo the contraceptive mandate, a key component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), threaten a major public health emergency, as well as the rule of law and separation of powers. The Trump Administration’s Rules greatly expand the grounds for exemption from the contraceptive mandate: they allow even publicly traded corporations to assert religious beliefs as a ground for exemption and exempt all employers except publicly traded corporations from compliance with the contraceptive mandate if they hold “moral convictions” in opposition to contraception. By denying women access to effective, affordable contraception, these Rules increase the odds …

Why Should We Care About International Law, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

International lawyers are used to having their discipline dismissed. A conspicuous strand of thought in U.S. foreign policy circles — known as realist — posits that international law does not matter. Realists of course recognize that states and other global actors speak the language of international law. But they view this discourse as cheap talk or epiphenomenal. They contend that state decisions on the international plane are animated not by the dictates of international law but by material interests and power. States act consistently with international law insofar as they have independent reasons for acting that way. If those reasons …

New Homeland Security Asylum Rule Allows Removal To Central American Countries That Have Signed Agreements With The U.S., Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judge Issues Temporary Restraining Order Against Proclamation Barring Uninsured Immigrants, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Enter At Your Own Risk: Criminalizing Asylum-Seekers, Thomas M. Mcdonnell, Vanessa H. Merton

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In nearly three years in office, President Donald J. Trump’s war against immigrants and the foreign-born seems only to have intensified. Through a series of Executive Branch actions and policies rather than legislation, the Trump Administration has targeted immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority countries, imposed quotas on and drastically reduced the independence of Immigration Court Judges, cut the number of refugees admitted by more than 80%, cancelled DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and stationed Immigration Customs and Enforcement (“ICE”) agents at state courtrooms to arrest unauthorized immigrants, intimidating them from participating as witnesses and litigants. Although initially saying that …