Administrative Law Commons^™

Nontraditional Investors, Jennifer S. Fan

Articles

In recent years, nontraditional investors have become a major player in the startup ecosystem. Under the regulatory regime of U.S. securities law, those in the public realm are heavily regulated, while those in the private realm are largely left alone. This public-private divide, which is a fundamental organizing principle of securities law, has eroded with the rise of nontraditional investors. While legal scholars have addressed the impact of some of these nontraditional investors individually, their collective impact on deal terms, deal timelines, due diligence, and board configuration has not been discussed in a holistic manner; neither has their impact on …

Bridges To A New Era Part 2: A Report On The Past, Present, And Potential Future Of Tribal Co-Management On Federal Lands In Alaska, Monte Mills, Martin Nie

Articles

Nowhere else in the United States are tribal connections and reliance on federal public lands as deep and geographically broad-based as in what is now Alaska. The number of Tribes—229 federally recognized tribes—and the scope of the public land resource—nearly 223 million acres—are simply unparalleled. Across that massive landscape, federal public lands and the subsistence uses they provide remain, as they have been since time immemorial, “essential to Native physical, economic, traditional, and cultural existence.”^[1] Alas, the institutions, systems, and processes responsible for managing those lands, protecting those uses, and honoring those connections are failing Alaska Native Tribes.

The …

Community Empowerment In Decarbonization: Nepa’S Role, Wyatt G. Sassman

Washington Law Review

This Article addresses a potential tension between two ambitions for the transition to clean energy: reducing regulatory red-tape to quickly build out renewable energy, and leveraging that build-out to empower low-income communities and communities of color. Each ambition carries a different view of communities’ role in decarbonization. To those focused on rapid build-out of renewable energy infrastructure, communities are a potential threat who could slow or derail renewable energy projects through opposition during the regulatory process. To those focused on leveraging the transition to clean energy to advance racial and economic justice, communities are necessary partners in the key decisions …

Structural Barriers To Inclusion In Arbitrator Pools, Nicole G. Iannarone

Washington Law Review

Critics increasingly challenge mandatory arbitration because the pools from which decisionmakers are selected are neither diverse nor inclusive. Evaluating diversity and inclusion in arbitrator pools is difficult due to the black box nature of mandatory arbitration. This Article evaluates inclusion in arbitrator pools through a case study on securities arbitration. The Article relies upon the relatively greater transparency of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) forum. It begins by describing the unique role that small claims securities arbitration plays in maintaining investor trust and confidence in the securities markets before describing why ensuring that the FINRA arbitrator pool is both …

The Federal Option: Delaware As A De Facto Agency, Omari Scott Simmons

Washington Law Review

Despite over 200 years of deliberation and debate, the United States has not adopted a federal corporate chartering law. Instead, Delaware is the “Federal Option” for corporate law and adjudication. The contemporary federal corporate chartering debate is, in part, a referendum on its role. Although the federal government has regulated other aspects of interstate commerce and has the power to charter corporations and preempt Delaware pursuant to its Commerce Clause power, it has not done so. Despite the rich and robust scholarly discussion of Delaware’s jurisdictional dominance, its role as a de facto national regulator remains underdeveloped. This Article addresses …

Police Or Pirates? Reforming Washington's Civil Asset Forfeiture System, Jasmin Chigbrow

Washington Law Review

Civil asset forfeiture laws permit police officers to seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity and sell or retain the property for the police department’s use. In many states, including Washington, civil forfeiture occurs independent of any criminal case—many property owners are never charged with the offense police allege occurred. Because the government is not required to file criminal charges, property owners facing civil forfeiture lack the constitutional safeguards normally guaranteed to defendants in the criminal justice system: the right to an attorney, the presumption of innocence, the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, …

Reimagining Exceptional Events: Regulating Wildfires Through The Clean Air Act, Emily Williams

Washington Law Review

Wildfires are increasing in both frequency and severity due to climate change. Smoke from these fires causes serious health problems. Land managers agree that prescribed burns help mitigate these negative consequences. Prescribed burns are lower-intensity fires that are intentionally ignited and managed for an ecological benefit. They reduce the amount of smoke produced and limit wildfire damage to natural systems and human property.

The Clean Air Act (CAA) is designed to regulate air pollution to protect public health, yet it exempts wildfire smoke through the exceptional events designation while imposing strict regulations on prescribed burns. Congress and the Environmental Protection …

Health Care Fraud Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry, Jacob T. Elberg

Washington Law Review

For decades, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued a steady flood of press releases announcing False Claims Act (FCA) settlements against health care entities and extolling the purportedly sharp message sent to the industry through these settlements about the consequences of engaging in wrongdoing. The FCA is the primary mechanism for government enforcement against health care entities engaged in wrongdoing, and it is expected to be DOJ’s key tool for addressing fraud arising out of government programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. DOJ has pointed to three key goals of its enforcement efforts (deterrence, incentivizing cooperation, and building …

Substance Use Disorder Discrimination And The Cares Act: Using Disability Law To Inform Part 2 Rulemaking, Kelly K. Dineen, Elizabeth Pendo

Articles

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a chronic health condition—like people with other chronic health conditions, people with SUDs experience periods of remission and periods of exacerbation or recurrence. Unlike people with most other chronic conditions, people with SUDs may be more likely to garner law enforcement attention than medical attention during a recurrence. They are also chronically disadvantaged by pervasive social stigma, discrimination, and structural inequities. The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating consequences for people with SUDs, who are at higher risk for both contracting the SARS-CoV-19 virus and experiencing poorer outcomes. Meanwhile, there are early indications that pandemic conditions …

The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Ryan Calo, Danielle Keats Citron

Articles

The legitimacy of the administrative state is premised on our faith in agency expertise. Despite their extra-constitutional structure, administrative agencies have been on firm footing for a long time in reverence to their critical role in governing a complex, evolving society. They are delegated enormous power because they respond expertly and nimbly to evolving conditions. In recent decades, state and federal agencies have embraced a novel mode of operation: automation. Agencies rely more and more on software and algorithms in carrying out their delegated responsibilities. The automated administrative state, however, is demonstrably riddled with concerns. Legal challenges regarding the denial …

News Reporting On Trump's Covid-19 Treatments: Should Broadcasters Have To Disclose Their Being Potentially Dangerous?, Dr. Joel Timmer

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, President Trump touted a number of treatments that many medical professionals considered dangerous. These treatments include hydroxychloroquine and disinfectants, which if misused could cause a patient’s death. This prompted Free Press to file an emergency petition with the FCC, arguing that broadcasters who report on Trump’s claims about these treatments without highlighting their dangers could be in violation of the Commission’s broadcast hoax rule. Free Press also requested the FCC require that broadcasters include disclaimers when reporting on such claims. This article examines whether the broadcast hoax rule has been …

Defective Patent Deference, Tejas N. Narechania

Washington Law Review

The Supreme Court’s implicit deference to the Office of the Solicitor General in patent cases is well-documented: What the Solicitor General requests, the Solicitor General typically receives. But we know far less about how the Solicitor General arrives at these preferred policy positions, or why the Solicitor General comes to advocate for some outcomes over others. This is problematic. In practically every other corner of the administrative state, an agency earns substantial deference to its views only where robust procedural protections attend to the policymaking process, where the agency’s outcome reflects its substantive expertise, and where the agency may, through …

The Substantial Impact Approach: Reviewing Policy Statements In Light Of Apa Finality, Emily Parsons

Washington Law Review

Federal agencies engage in a wide range of non-binding action, issuing guidance documents such as policy statements and interpretive rules. Although these guidance documents may have a substantial impact on industries or members of the public, courts often refuse to review their substance. The Administrative Procedure Act requires agency action to be “final” before courts can review it. The D.C. Circuit and the Ninth Circuit have taken conflicting and often messy approaches in determining whether interpretive rules and policy statements are final and thus reviewable. This Comment proposes a new approach: the substantial impact approach. Under this approach—repurposed from a …

Invalid Harms: Improper Use Of The Administrative Procedure Act's Good Cause Exemption, Miriam R. Stiefel

Washington Law Review

On October 13, 2017, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, U.S. Department of Treasury, and U.S. Department of Labor published two nearly identical interim final rules in the Federal Register. To do so, the agencies invoked the Administrative Procedure Act’s good cause exemption, permitting the rules to bypass prepromulgation notice and comment rulemaking requirements. The interim final rules allowed employers and insurers that provide group healthcare coverage under the Affordable Care Act to seek constitutional and moral exemptions—specifically for contraceptives and other preventive health services coverage. Using the two 2017 interim final rules as an illustration, this Comment …

Some Kind Of Hearing Officer, Kent H. Barnett

Washington Law Review

In his prominent 1975 law-review article, “Some Kind of Hearing,” Second Circuit Judge Henry Friendly explored how courts and agencies should respond when the Due Process Clause required—in the U.S. Supreme Court’s exceedingly vague words—“some kind of hearing.” That phrase led to the familiar Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test, under which courts weigh three factors to determine how much process or formality is due. But the U.S. Supreme Court has never applied Mathews to another, often ignored, facet of due process: the requirement for impartial adjudicators. As it turns out, Congress and agencies have broad discretion to fashion not only …

The Costs Of Uncertainty: The Doj’S Stalled Progress On Accessible Medical Equipment Under The Americans With Disabilities Act, Elizabeth Pendo

Articles

Imagine seeking medical care for serious pressure sores for a year, but your doctor never examining the sores because you could not get on the examination table in her office. Or imagine going more than fifteen years without an annual well-woman examination for the same reason, or your doctor guessing at the right dosage for a prescription because there was no scale that she could use to weigh you.

Although these scenarios may be difficult for many to imagine, they are common experiences for individuals with mobility disability. The Trump administration’s attacks on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act …

To Withdraw Or Not To Withdraw: Reviewability Of An Agency's Withdrawn Proposed Rule, Jane E. Carmody

Washington Law Review

Federal agencies propose thousands of regulations in any given year. The Administrative Procedure Act requires such agencies to follow certain procedures when enacting rules and regulations. However, when an agency proposes a new rule that is purely discretionary—not mandated by Congress—it may withdraw the proposed rule at any point before the rule is finalized. In October 2017, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) withdrew a proposed rule that, if enacted, would have required long-term care facilities to recognize out of state same-sex marriages as a condition of Medicare and Medicaid participation. In its formal withdrawal published in the Federal …

Courts As Gatekeepers: The Case For Minimal Deference To Agency Interpretations Of The Common Law, Brent Droze

Washington Law Review

In Flytenow, Inc. v. FAA, the D.C. Circuit encountered an important, yet unresolved, question: how much deference should a court give an agency for its interpretation of a common-law term used in a statute or regulation? Traditionally, the Chevron and Auer deference doctrines provide agencies significant freedom in clarifying and interpreting statutes and regulations. The use of these doctrines, though, becomes problematic when applied to fact patterns where agencies interpret the meaning of common-law terms. This Comment argues that courts should not apply either Chevron or Auer deference doctrines in cases where an agency interprets a term that already …

Visual Rulemaking, Elizabeth G. Porter, Kathryn A. Watts

Articles

Visual politics are seeping into the technocracy. Rulemaking stakeholders—including agencies, the President, and members of the public—are deploying politically tinged visuals to push their agendas at every stage of high-stakes, often virulently controversial, rulemakings. These images, GIFs, and videos usually do not make it into the official rulemaking record, so this new “visual rulemaking” world has not been discussed much by scholars or others.

In this article, we explore the new visual rulemaking culture that emerged in Obama’s presidency, providing examples and discussing relevant policy implications. Although we recognize some risks, we argue that, on balance, visual rulemaking is a …

Tokyo High Court, Judgment For Jasrac Case (2013) (Japan), Chengyu Shi

Washington International Law Journal

The Tokyo High Court, Judgment of November 1, 2013 made a unique judgment in regard to standing to sue for a party who is not a direct addressee. Under the Japanese Administrative Case Litigation Act Article 9, Section 1, only “a person with legal interest” can bring an administrative lawsuit. The definition of “a person with legal interest” for revocation of a public order is an individual whose legal rights or interests are protected by law and are being infringed or threatened with unavoidable infringement. In addition to this definition, the Court considered not only the text of the law, …

The Other Securities Regulator: A Case Study In Regulatory Damage, Anita K. Krug

Articles

Although the Securities and Exchange Commission is the primary securities regulator in the United States, the Department of Labor also engages in securities regulation. It does so by virtue of its authority to administer the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the statute that governs the investment of retirement assets. In 2016, the DOL used its securities regulatory authority to adopt a rule that, for the first time, designates securities brokers who provide investment advice to retirement investors as fiduciaries subject to ERISA's stringent transaction prohibitions. The new rule's objective is salutary, to be sure. However this Article shows that, …

State Standing To Challenge Federal Authority In The Modern Administrative State, Shannon M. Roesler

Washington Law Review

The modern administrative state relies on a model of shared governance. Federal regulatory regimes addressing a range of economic and social issues depend on the participation of state governments for their implementation. Although these state-federal partnerships are often cooperative, conflicts over the allocation of regulatory authority and administrative policy are inevitable. In recent years, states have sought to resolve some of these conflicts in the federal courts. Well-known state challenges to federal authority include challenges to environmental rules, health insurance legislation, and immigration policies. In these cases, courts have struggled to decide whether states have constitutional standing to bring suit …

Consume Or Invest: What Do/Should Agency Leaders Maximize?, William E. Kovacic, David A. Hyman

Washington Law Review

In the regulatory state, agency leaders face a fundamental choice: should they “consume,” or should they “invest”? “Consume” means launching high profile cases and rulemaking projects. “Invest” means developing and nurturing the necessary infrastructure for the agency to handle whatever the future may bring. The former brings headlines, while the latter will be completely ignored. Unsurprisingly, consumption is routinely prioritized, and investment is deferred, downgraded, or overlooked entirely. This Article outlines the incentives for agency leadership to behave in this way and explores the resulting agency costs (pun intended). The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s health care portfolio provides a useful …

Exhaustion Of Administrative Remedies In Washington State

Washington Law Review Online

The doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies requires plaintiffs to exhaust all available administrative appeals before challenging an agency’s action in court. Washington courts describe exhaustion requirements, thresholds, and exceptions with varying degrees of consistency and frequent muddled overlap. Despite the fact that administrative exhaustion widely impacts Washington litigants, the secondary literature on the topic is fairly sparse. And, given the doctrine’s confusing and harsh nature, it can bar judicial review of valid claims. This article aims to address both of these issues. First, we offer a comprehensive review of the doctrine as it currently stands, with the intent of …

Explaining Comparative Administrative Law: The Standing Of Positive Political Theory, Benjamin Minhao Chen, Zhiyu Li

Washington International Law Journal

The principal-agent model of administrative law sees bureaucrats as imperfectly supervised agents of their political principals and courts as a tool used by the latter to monitor and check the former. This paper compares how the class of plaintiffs authorized to bring suit against governmental bodies has been defined in three countries where one should expect to find significant barriers to administrative litigation—Japan, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Although these three Asian countries have traditionally been one-party dominated states, we do observe substantial differences in how legislatures and courts have addressed the issue of standing over time. It …

Interpretation Of The Supreme People's Court On Several Issues Concerning The Application Of "Administrative Ligitation Law Of The People's Republic Of China", Benjamin Minhao Chen, Zhiyu Li

Washington International Law Journal

For the proper application of the “Administrative Litigation Law of the People’s Republic of China” amended at the 11th session of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People's Congress, in consideration of the actual circumstances of the people’s courts, the interpretation on the application of the relevant provisions is hereby issued as follows:

Visual Rulemaking, Elizabeth G. Porter, Kathryn A. Watts

Articles

Federal rulemaking has traditionally been understood as a text-bound, technocratic process. However, as this Article is the first to uncover, rulemaking stakeholders—including agencies, the President, and members of the public—are now deploying politically tinged visuals to push their agendas at every stage of high-stakes, often virulently controversial, rulemakings. Rarely do these visual contributions appear in the official rulemaking record, which remains defined by dense text, lengthy cost-benefit analyses, and expert reports. Perhaps as a result, scholars have overlooked the phenomenon we identify here: the emergence of a visual rulemaking universe that is splashing images, GIFs, and videos across social media …

Controlling Presidential Control, Kathryn A. Watts

Articles

Presidents Reagan and Clinton laid the foundation for strong presidential control over the administrative state, institutionalizing White House review of agency regulations. Presidential control, however, did not stop there. To the contrary, it has evolved and deepened during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Indeed, President Obama’s efforts to control agency action have dominated the headlines in recent months, touching on everything from immigration to drones to net neutrality.

Despite the entrenchment of presidential control over the modern regulatory state, administrative law has yet to adapt. To date, the most pervasive response both inside and outside the …

Actic Law & Policy Year In Review: 2015, Craig H. Allen, Bridgette J. Cooper, Adam Murray

Articles

A review of significant legal developments affecting the Arctic, including treaties and other international agreements; actions by the U.S. Congress, President, and other federal agencies; developments from the European Union and ten foreign countries; and several international organizations. Also addressed are themes including arctic marine shipping; indigneous residents; marine resources; military activities; polar icebreakers; pollution prevention, response, and liability; and scientific research.

The Dmca Rulemaking Mechanism: Fail Or Safe?, Maryna Koberidze

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

This Article analyzes seventeen years under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) rulemaking mechanism and suggests changes to reinforce its successes while remedying its failures. Part I briefly discusses the legislative history of the rulemaking mechanism and policy justifications for its adoption within the DMCA scheme. Part II reviews legal and evidentiary standards of the rulemaking and recent changes to its administrative procedure. Part III provides an overview of the prior rulemakings and their impact on non-infringing uses, with a particular focus on the “e-book” and “cellphone unlocking” exemptions. Part IV applauds the Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act of …