Administrative Law Commons^™

A Constitution Of Democratic Experimentalism, Michael C. Dorf, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professors Dorf and Sabel identify a new form of government, democratic experimentalism, in which power is decentralized to enable citizens and other actors to utilize their local knowledge to fit solutions to their individual circumstances, but in which regional and national coordinating bodies require actors to share their knowledge with others facing similar problems. This information pooling, informed by the example of novel kinds of coordination within and among private firms, both increases the efficiency of public administration by encouraging mutual learning among its parts and heightens its accountability through participation of citizens in the decisions …

The Great Transformation Of Regulated Industries Law, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The nation's approach to regulating its transportation, telecommunications, and energy industries has undergone a great transformation in the last quarter-century. The original paradigm of regulation, which was established with the Interstate Commerce Act's regulation of railroads beginning in 1887, was characterized by legislative creation of an administrative agency charged with general regulatory oversight of particular industries. This approach did not depend on whether the regulated industry was naturally competitive or was a natural monopoly, and it was designed to advance accepted goals of reliability and, in particular, non-discrimination. By contrast, under the new paradigm, which is manifested most clearly in …

Congressional Reviews Of Agency Regulations, Daniel Cohen, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

On March 29, 1996, President Clinton signed Public Law 104-121, the Contract with America Advancement Act of 1996. Title II, the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996 ("Act"), among other things, added a new chapter 8 to Title 5 of the United States Code. Chapter 8 requires congressional review of agency regulations. Beginning March 29, 1996, all federal agencies, including independent agencies, are required to submit each final and interim final rule for review by Congress and to the General Accounting Office (GAO) before the final or interim final rule can take effect (hereinafter final and interim final …

Capture Theory And The Courts: 1967-1983, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") is a framework statute, not a complete code. Its central provisions are rather spare, and a number of important questions are not covered at all. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the judicial gloss on the APA has taken on a large significance over time. It should also come as no surprise that this interpretative mantle has assumed a different shape with different generations of judges. In this respect, our experience with the APA parallels that with the Constitution. Occasionally there is a feint in the direction of enforcing the "original understanding" of the …

Golden Rules For Transboundary Pollution, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental law is becoming ever more centralized. In the United States, state and local pollution laws have been eclipsed by federal regulation. In the European Community, and to a lesser degree under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), national controls have been supplemented by regional regulation. And the growing importance of treaties regulating particular aspects of the global environment has reinforced calls for more general regimes of international environmental regulation.

One inevitably given justification for this centralizing trend is that pollution is a transboundary phenomenon. Air and water pollution, and to a lesser extent groundwater contamination, can cross political …

Presidential Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

One of the prominent issues during the 1992 presidential campaign was abortion, in particular the federal government's role in financing counseling activities that might promote it. In the Bush Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services had adopted a controversial regulation to withhold federal funds from any family planning or other medical service that included counseling about abortion in its activities; the Clinton campaign promised to rescind that regulation if Clinton were elected President. Shortly after his election, in a prominent White House ceremony, President Clinton announced that he had directed the rescission of the prior rule and the …

Administrative Law: The Hidden Comparative Law Course, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

What does today's Administrative Law course give your students that you might not be aware of and might be helped by knowing? That, as I understand it, is the question I am to answer. But we may also want to think about the overall shape of the curriculum: it may be useful to ask about fundamental issues our students may not be aware of, that may not be dealt with elsewhere in the law school curriculum. I'll spend most of my time on the question I've been asked to address, but I hope you will accept a few sentences on …

Regulatory Cooperation Between The European Commission And U.S. Administrative Agencies, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the policies and practices of the European Commission toward various forms of bilateral regulatory cooperation with administrative agencies of the United States. To place this Article's findings in a proper perspective, it is essential to understand both (A) the selection of the European Community (E.C.) as an appropriate overseas regulatory jurisdiction for such cooperation and (B) the reasons for focusing on the European Commission among the various E.C. institutions. Those questions are taken up in this Introduction. Part I describes in some detail the organization and functioning of the Commission. Part II – the core of this …

Walter Gellhorn, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Gellhorn had been a primary figure in administrative law and at Columbia for thirty-five years when I arrived here twenty-five years ago, hoping to establish a scholarly career. Yet it is impossible to recall any expectations I might have had about my relationship with him at the time. He was the unseen father of a camp and college friend whose warmth and wit I had cherished, more than he was a dominant member of Columbia's remarkable faculty. He quickly became my mentor and guide. I seem to have spent all the time since that day learning at his feet …

Changing Times: The Apa At Fifty, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In early October 1995, Walter Gellhorn helped to open a National Archives display commemorating the fiftieth birthday of the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA"). That Act had begun to take shape just prior to World War II, when Gellhorn had directed the Attorney General's Committee on Administrative Procedure. Created in response to a political spasm of legislative activity that produced a "reform" bill President Roosevelt vetoed, Gellhorn's committee engaged in a thorough and careful survey of administrative agencies and their procedures. In the end, the committee produced twenty-seven monographs describing the variety of decision-making processes employed by the agencies and a …

Risk Assessment Perspectives, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

I have a slightly different subtitle for our session today, which I hope our panelists may consider in addressing the many challenges before them: Cost-Benefit Analysis and Risk Assessment under Diminished Resources. Allan Morrison introduced the resource problem at the end of yesterday's session. It is an important element of the problems we face.

I think another element of those problems is finding a reasoned way of addressing these issues. The contrast between reasoned decisionmaking and political football was also nicely in evidence yesterday, perhaps especially strongly for those of us who have been responsible for putting together these presentations. …

From Expertise To Politics: The Transformation Of American Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In this speech to be given on November 15, 1996, as the American contribution to the week-long conference on administrative law sponsored by the Fundaci6n Estudios de Derecho Administrativo in Caracas, Venezuela, Professor Peter L. Strauss addresses the history and developing political character of rulemaking in federal law over the fifty years since enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act. As a framework, Professor Strauss sets forth a hierarchy of institutional rulemaking, from constitution through informal advising. He then develops his discussion of rulemaking by tracing the federal process of rulemaking through time, beginning with the enactment of the Administrative Procedure …

On Resegregating The Worlds Of Statute And Common Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In the early afternoon of a humid, 97 degree summer day, James Gottshall was part of a crew of mostly 50- to 60-year-old men replacing track for Conrail. Michael Norvick, the crew supervisor, pressed the men to finish the work. He discouraged observance of the scheduled breaks. Richard Johns collapsed in the heat; Norvick ordered the men back to work as soon as a cold compress had revived him. Five minutes later Johns collapsed again, the victim of a heart attack. Gottshall began 40 minutes of ultimately fruitless cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Johns, his friend for 15 years. Norvick was unable …

Pluralism, The Prisoner's Dilemma, And The Behavior Of The Independent Judiciary, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of Thayer's conception of judicial review, as this symposium amply demonstrates, tend to be normative. Professor Nick Zeppos's paper, which offers more of a positive analysis, is therefore a welcome addition. Zeppos's paper includes three especially valuable insights. First, he demonstrates the close parallel between Thayer's theory of judicial review and the Supreme Court's Chevron doctrine. The former would have the judiciary enforce clear constitutional commands but otherwise defer to legislative understandings of constitutional meaning; the latter would have courts enforce clear legislative commands but otherwise defer to administrative interpretations of statutes. Second, he offers evidence that in both …

Regulatory Cooperation With Counterpart Agencies Abroad: The Faa's Aircraft Certification Experience, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines in some detail the practice and experience of one agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, and more particularly its Aircraft Certification Service, that has of recent years consciously engaged in forms of concerted activity with certain counterpart agencies abroad. This "case study" is of particular interest because the FAA's practice of intergovernmentalism includes, but also goes beyond, cooperation in rulemaking to embrace a certain amount of cooperation in more routine aspects of administration. The study may also be of interest because the intergovernmentalism engaged in largely involves cooperation with a body – the European Joint Aviation Authorities – …

The Rulemaking Continuum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The two papers we have before us tell both descriptive and normative stories about current issues of rulemaking. Each suggests, in its field of attention, pressures that operate to increase proceduralization and agency responses to those pressures, as well as an attitude toward these developments. In rulemaking, as in other activities, discretion and order are in constant tension; one might find in that tension the very engine that makes the processes of public law go. Like the studies that assisted the move away from formal rulemaking, and the perceptions underlying the Supreme Court's Vermont Yankee decision, which quieted the judicial …

Revisiting Overton Park: Political And Judicial Controls Over Administrative Actions Affecting The Community, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Overton Park is a 342-acre municipal park lying close to downtown Memphis, Tennessee, in one of that city's better residential areas. Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, Inc. v. Volpe is a Supreme Court decision frequently cited for its general propositions about judicial review of informal administrative action that, to the citizens of Memphis, was one way-station in a more than two-decade struggle concerning whether and where an inner-city expressway, part of Interstate 40, would be built. Overall, the story of that struggle reveals a complex brew of national and local politics about the marriage of highway convenience to urban amenity; …

Judicial Deference To Executive Precedent, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, the Supreme Court adopted a new framework for determining when courts should defer to interpretations of statutes by administrative agencies. Previous decisions had looked to multiple contextual factors in answering this question. Chevron U.S., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. appeared to reject this approach and require that federal courts defer to any reasonable interpretation by an agency charged with administration of a statute, provided Congress has not clearly specified a contrary answer. The Court justified this new general rule of deference by positing that Congress has implicitly delegated interpretative authority to all agencies charged with enforcing …

Sunstein, Statutes, And The Common Law – Reconciling Markets, The Communal Impulse, And The Mammoth State, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Cass Sunstein's new book, After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State, builds upon, and in important ways seeks to integrate, much of Professor Sunstein's work over the past several years. He has been one of our most prolific and influential writers on issues of governmental structure, approaching the subject both from more or less conventional administrative law perspectives and from the constitutional perspectives of separation of powers. His work has dealt with a tension often addressed in the literature, that between the eighteenth-century Madisonian constitutional engine of limited, internally checked government and the realities of our sprawling …

Considering Political Alternatives To "Hard Look" Review, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

That is absolutely right. I am sufficiently confused by the facts that are already on the table – two of them in particular. One (the dog that I thought was barking in that interesting first chart Don Elliott put up, on which he did not remark), is that the first two periods of judicial review he showed us had 337 and 294 cases of judicial review each; for the third period, for the same length of time, the figure is about 800. Something is going on there. The other is just a square conflict that our moderator is much better …

Independent Agencies – Independent From Whom?, Sally Katzen, Edward Markey, James Miller, Joseph Grundfest, R. Gaull Silberman, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Administrative Law Symposium: Question & Answer With Professors Elliott, Strauss, And Sunstein, Dick Pierce, Donald Elliott, Peter L. Strauss, Cass Sunstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

One Hundred Fifty Cases Per Year: Some Implications Of The Supreme Court's Limited Resources For Judicial Review Of Agency Action, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Recent writing about the Supreme Court has stressed the implications of the extraordinary growth in the Court's docket – and, even more, the growth in the overall level of judicial activity in the nation's courts – for its performance of its judicial task. Generally, this writing seeks first to determine whether the Court has been forced to bypass questions it ought normally to hear (for example, square conflicts between two of the federal circuits), editorializes about the increasing bureaucratization of the Court, and passes on to normative questions about what if anything ought to be done to ease the Court's …

The Role Of The President And Omb In Informal Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss, Cass R. Sunstein

Faculty Scholarship

Regulatory reform has been a subject of frequent discussion in the last decade, especially in the context of presidential efforts to assert control over the rulemaking process. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan have all attempted to increase presidential authority over regulation. In particular, President Reagan has issued two executive orders that give the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) considerable power over the rulemaking activities of executive agencies.

In this article, we set forth our views on the role of presidential supervision in the regulatory process, with particular attention to the questions raised by the recent executive orders.

Federal Tort Claims At The Agency Level: The Ftca Administrative Process, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Tort actions against the federal government and its agencies are currently governed by the FTCA and various other statutes, agency rules and procedures. Claims against the government are increasing rapidly, and the agencies enjoy broad settlement authority, often at the expense of coordination among the appropriate statutes. This Article examines the various procedures allowed and those that are actually practiced by the agencies. The author points out that, though claims officers are supposed to be fair-minded, the process can take on an adversarial nature, often a prelude to litigation rather than settlement. He proposes that the current processes be made …

The Place Of Agencies In Government: Separation Of Powers And The Fourth Branch, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

For the past few years the Supreme Court has been struggling with issues of government structure so fundamental that they might have been thought textbook simple, yet with results that seem to imperil the everyday exercise of law-administration. Under what circumstances can Congress assign the adjudication of contested issues in the first instance to tribunals that are not article III courts? The past century has witnessed the profuse growth of legislation assigning to special adjudicative tribunals – administrative agencies and other article I courts – the power to hold trial-type hearings that might otherwise have been placed in the article …

Teaching Administrative Law: The Wonder Of The Unknown, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Sunday, March 7, 1982

Dear Roger:

You would have enjoyed being among the hundred-odd administrative law teachers and hangers-on who met this past weekend for the AALS Workshop on Administrative Law, organized by Ernest Gellhorn of Virginia, [now dean at Case Western]. Perhaps it was the plane ride home, when I had a chance to read Frank Easterbrook's short but very elegant use of Arrow's Theorem in a recent Harvard Law Review; or perhaps it is just a goodnight's sleep, home away from the sybaritic pleasures of New Orleans, and knowing my dean will want a justification in terms …

Marbury And The Administrative State, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Marbury v. Madison's prominence as a constitutional decision has long deflected interest in examining its other implications. But prior to proclaiming judicial competence to invalidate an act of Congress, the Court sustained judicial authority to enforce the specific statutory duties of administrative officials. Had the doctrine of separation of powers been understood from the beginning to bar any judicial control of administrative power, the constitutional scheme would have gone seriously awry at the outset. Congressional directives either would have been subordinated to the will of the executive department or would have generated collateral and unseemly struggles between the two …

Regulatory Reform In A Time Of Transition, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

As Americans have become both disheartened at the performance of their governments and conscious of their penetration into what were once private lives, regulatory reform has been urged with increasing fervor at both federal and state levels. Some of the reform talk is lawyer's talk, some of it is directed to the most fundamental aspects of the government order, and there is a good bit in between. My purpose here is to examine a number of the directions being suggested at the federal level for regulatory reform during the coming decade. While it would be helpful also to consider state …

Disqualifications Of Decisional Officials In Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

What constraints on impartiality govern agency officials responsible for decisions in proceedings other than on-the-record adjudications? The past few years have witnessed the emergence of a striking body of professional debate, statute, and case law concerning ethics in government and the control of "special interest" influence on governmental decisions. Higher standards for conflict of interest, expanded constraints on ex parte communications, and enlarged concems about separation of functions within the agencies are parts of this development. Another strand, tangled with the others yet doctrinally distinct, concerns the disqualification of responsible government officials for their prior contacts with or expressions of …