Administrative Law Commons^™

A Softer Formalism, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

As our colleagues have often remarked, Professor John Manning's and my views have moved much closer to each other since I wrote the piece he graciously uses as the stalking horse for unmitigated functionalism, and he more recently established himself as the scholarly spokesperson for Scalian textualism and formalism.

I greatly admire the moderate and exquisitely informed voice of Separation of Powers as Ordinary Interpretation, which deserves the important influence it will doubtless have. The brief thoughts that follow are to suggest only that (as scholars often enough do) he somewhat exaggerates the characteristics of the schools that he …

Paul Verkuil's Projects For The Administrative Conference Of The U.S. 1974-1992, Jeffrey Lubbers

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I am really happy to be part of this tribute to Paul Verkuil. It may surprise those in the audience to learn that I am bringing some needed diversity to today's proceedings - I am the only other Dutch American on the program! But perhaps my twenty years at the "Administrative Conference" also qualifies me to say a few words about how thrilled I am that we have it back - "ACUS 2.0" we can call it, complete with a website this time- and that Paul is at its helm. And I want to thank Paul for bringing me back …

Acus 2.0 And Its Historical Antecedents, Jeffrey Lubbers

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Transparency In The Administration Of Laws: The Relationship Between Differing Justifications For Transparency And Differing Views Of Administrative Law, Robert Vaughn

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Hide And Seek: What Agencies Can (And Can't) Do To Limit Judicial Review, Amanda Leiter

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Many authors discuss judicial oversight of agency actions. Our subject, which is less well examined, is agencies’ role in modulating that oversight. We consider cases in which the timing or form of an agency action has curtailed judicial review of the agency’s policy choices. In some such cases, the agency’s choice of form deprived the court of statutory or Article III jurisdiction. In others, the court chose to delay or deny review to avoid interfering with agency policy development. Despite these differences, though, all such “reviewability” cases pose important constitutional questions about the degree to which an agency should be …

Natural Resource “Conflicts” In The U.S. Southwest, William Snape

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Environmental laws and the ecosystems they support are under attack. Intermittently since the Reagan administration and increasingly since the 2008 economic collapse, certain politicians and their industry sponsors have inundated the media with angry rhetoric, blaming historic job losses on "overregulation."' Environmental laws are a frequent target of these politicians who often benefit from contributions supplied by the fossil fuel and mining industries. Ignoring the successes of these laws- cleaner air, cleaner water, and recovering imperiled wild species and habitat-they claim that environmental regulations are "job killers." Reflecting the success of these claims, the recent House Fiscal Year 2012 …

Punctuated Equilibrium: A Model For Administrative Evolution, Mark Niles

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Search For Fair Agency Process: The Immigration Opinions Of Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, 1994-2010, Lenni B. Benson

Articles & Chapters

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins has been a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals since 1994; but he has been concerned with the forms and varieties of administrative or bureaucratic process his entire career. When he became a member of the federal judiciary, his role was clearly altered. However, his commitment to fairness and integrity in adjudication remained undiminished. This article will explore some of Judge Hawkins’s many immigration decisions, both majority and dissenting opinions, which reflect his commitment to the preservation of a due process.

The reality of immigration adjudication in the Ninth Circuit is that there are …

Article Iii, Agency Adjudication, And The Origins Of The Appellate Review Model Of Administrative Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

American administrative law is grounded in a conception of the relationship between reviewing courts and agencies modeled on the relationship between appeals courts and trial courts in civil litigation. This appellate review model was not an inevitable foundation of administrative law, but it has had far-reaching consequences, and its origins are poorly understood. This Article details how the appellate review model emerged after 1906 as an improvised response by the U.S. Supreme Court to a political crisis brought on by aggressive judicial review of decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Once the jeny-built model was in place, Congress signaled its …

Against Flexibility, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contemporary legal thinking is in the thrall of a cult of flexibility. We obsess about avoiding decisions without all possible relevant information while ignoring the costs of postponing decisions until that information becomes available. We valorize procrastination and condemn investments of decisional resources in early decisions.

Both public and private law should be understood as a productive activity converting information, norms, and decisional and enforcement capacity into outputs of social value. Optimal timing depends on changes in these inputs’ scarcity and in the value of the decision they produce. Our legal culture tends to overestmate the value of information that …

Legislative Organization And Administrative Redundancy, Michael Doran

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis.

The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy …

Coming Clean And Cleaning Up: Does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing?, Michael W. Toffel, Jodi Short

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Administrative agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether self-reporting can reliably indicate effective self-policing efforts that might provide opportunities for enforcement efficiencies. We find that regulators used self-reports of legal violations as a heuristic for identifying firms that are effectively policing their own operations, shifting enforcement resources away from voluntary disclosers. We also find that firms that voluntarily disclosed regulatory violations and committed to self-policing improved their regulatory compliance and environmental performance, suggesting that the enforcement relief they received was warranted. Collectively, …

Comparing Regulatory Oversight Bodies Across The Atlantic: The Office Of Information And Regulatory Affairs In The Us And The Impact Assessment Board In The Eu, Jonathan B. Wiener, Alberto Alemanno

Faculty Scholarship

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ asked the Roman poet Juvenal – ‘who will watch the watchers, who will guard the guardians?’ As legislative and regulatory processes around the globe progressively put greater emphasis on impact assessment and accountability, we ask: who oversees the regulators? Although regulation can often be necessary and beneficial, it can also impose its own costs. As a result, many governments have embraced, or are considering embracing, regulatory oversight--frequently relying on economic analysis as a tool of evaluation. We are especially interested in the emergence over the last four decades of a new set of institutional actors, the …

Adaptive Regulation In The Amoral Bazaar, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Twelfth Oliver Schreiner Memorial Lecture,delivered on 20 October 2010 at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Many gradual changes in science, law and society are crystallizing to shape a significant transformation in administrative law. The doctrinal framework within which Justice Schreiner himself attempted to modernize how law should regulate government and private economic activity seems from our vantage point to be quite antiquated. In explaining why, my examples will come from the world of financial services, but they could easily be found anywhere in the area of law and regulation. First I will outline the …

State Enforcement Of Federal Law, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

Federal law is enforced through a combination of public and private efforts. Virtually all federal civil statutes vest enforcement authority in a federal agency; some also create private rights of action that permit private parties to sue to enforce federal law. Decades of commentary on the choice between public and private enforcement have generated a remarkably stable set of arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of each type. But the conventional wisdom tells only part of the story, as it ignores variations within the category of public enforcement. In fact, there are two distinct types of public enforcement. Many federal …

When Delegation Begets Domination: Due Process Of Administrative Lawmaking, Evan J. Criddle

Georgia Law Review

In federal administrative law, the nondelegation
doctrine purports to forbid Congress from entrusting its
essential legislative powers to administrative agencies.
The Supreme Court developed this doctrine during the
nineteenth century to safeguard republican values
embedded in the Constitution. Over time, however, the
Court has loosened the doctrine's grip, permitting federal
agencies to wield broad lawmaking powers subject to
minimalist "intelligible principles" established by
Congress. The Court has defended this approach on
pragmatic grounds, arguing that Congress cannot perform
its essential legislative function without entrusting
lawmaking authority to administrative agencies. What
the Court has never adequately addressed, however, is the
extent …

Spilling Secrets: Trade Secret Disclosure And Takings In Offshore Drilling Regulation, Michael A. Greene

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

This Article will explore whether the law may require the disclosure of adequate proprietary information to enable effective regulation. Part II will discuss the settled law regarding the property status of trade secrets, the regulatory takings doctrine, the applicability of the Takings Clause of the United States Constitution to proprietary data, and the exactions doctrine. Part III will explore the validity of the mandatory submission of proprietary health, safety, and environmental data to government regulators, with the guarantee that such data will be kept secret from competitors and the public. Part IV will then explore the validity of regulation mandating …

Excluding Unemployed Workers From Job Opportunities: Why Disparate Impact Protections Still Matter, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Credit Derivatives, Leverage, And Financial Regulation's Missing Macroeconomic Dimension, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Of all OTC derivatives, credit derivatives pose particular concerns because of their ability to generate leverage that can increase liquidity - or the effective money supply - throughout the financial system. Credit derivatives and the leverage they create thus do much more than increase the fragility of financial institutions and increase counterparty risk. By increasing leverage and liquidity, credit derivatives can fuel rises in asset prices and even asset price bubbles. Rising asset prices can then mask mistakes in the pricing of credit derivatives and in assessments of overall leverage in the financial system. Furthermore, the use of credit derivatives …