Administrative Law Commons^™

Copyright Policymaking As Procedural Democratic Process: A Discourse-Theoretic Perspective On Acta, Sopa, And Pipa, Annemarie Bridy

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Capture Nuances In The Contest For Financial Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Applying capture analysis in the hotly contested arena of financial regulation is difficult. Numerous regulators with widely differing missions and widely diverse stakeholders are involved. Regulators operate under widely differing authorizing legislation. They even function at different levels of government. Agencies are often at odds with each other when it comes to determining optimal public policy. Unlike policy disputes in many other areas of regulation, which can be settled by reference to scientific data, public policy in financial regulation rests profoundly on essentially contested economic ideologies. This makes financial policy doubly difficult: one the one hand, it requires deep expertise—and …

Serial Litigation In Administrative Law: What Can Repeat Cases Tell Us About Judicial Review, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

In Deference and Dialogue in Administrative Law, Emily Meazell takes up the topic of serial administrative law litigation. These repeated rounds of challenges and remands, which Meazell finds are particularly prevalent in contexts of risk regulation, provide a new lens on court-agency relationships. Meazell closely reviews several instances of such litigation, spanning topics as diverse as endangered species, potential workplace carcinogens, and financial qualifications of nuclear plant operators. She argues that such close examination reveals a process of dialogue, with agencies ultimately (if not immediately) responding to judicial concerns and courts in turn acknowledging administrative responses.

Of Dialogue--And Democracy--In Administrative Law, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Linda Cohen and Matthew Spitzer's study, "The Government Litigant Advantage," sheds important light on how the Solicitor General's litigation behavior may impact the Supreme Court's decision making agenda and outcomes for regulatory and administrative law cases. By emphasizing how the Solicitor General affects cases that the Supreme Court decides, Cohen and Spitzer's findings confirm that administrative law's emphasis on lower appellate court decisions is not misplaced. Some say that D.C. Circuit cases carry equal-if not more-precedential weight than Supreme Court decisions in resolving administrative law issues. Cohen and Spitzer use positive political theory to provide a novel explanation for some …

Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit: Bureaucratic Politics In Federal Workplace Agencies Serving Undocumented Workers, Ming H. Chen

Publications

This Article integrates social science theory about immigrant incorporation and administrative agencies with empirical data about immigrant-serving federal workplace agencies to illuminate the role of bureaucracies in the construction of rights. More specifically, it contends that immigrants' rights can be protected when workplace agencies incorporate immigrants into labor law enforcement in accordance with the agencies' professional ethos and organizational mandates. Building on Miles' Law that "where you stand depends on where you sit," this Article argues that agencies exercise discretion in the face of contested law and in contravention to a political climate hostile to undocumented immigrants for the purpose …

Genealogies Of Risk: Searching For Safety, 1930s-1970s, William Boyd

Publications

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s--a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of …

Promising To Be Prudent: A Private Law Approach To Mortgage Loan Regulation In Common-Interest Communities, Julia Patterson Forrester Rogers, Jerome Organ

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article explores one possible private law prescription that may help common-interest communities avoid the financial disaster associated with foreclosure epidemics-a financing restriction that would limit (1) the ability of any homeowner in a common-interest community to borrow excessively against the value of her home, and (2) the ability of lenders to make loans that a homeowner does not have the ability to repay. Part I of this Article begins in the Great Depression with a discussion of Neponsit Property Owners' Association v. Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, w exploring how the case both fostered the development of common-interest communities and …

A Pragmatic Republic, If You Can Keep It, Bill Sherman

Faculty Articles

The administrative state has been bedeviled by doubts about its democratic legitimacy and its questionable Constitutional provenance. Courts and scholars attack or shore up this weakness, but almost all proceed on the assumption that the administrative state is a modern leviathan unimaginable to the Founders. Consequently, questions about the role of politics in agency decisions assign a disfavored role to “pure politics” in rulemaking. This Book Review Essay challenges that assumption and its implications for the role of politics in administrative decisionmaking. Centering on a review of Jerry L. Mashaw’s new book, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred …

Bring In The Nerds: Secrecy, National Security, And The Creation Of International Intellectual Property Law, David S. Levine

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The negotiations of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement have been conducted largely in secret, elevating intellectual property piracy to the level of national security concerns for purposes of accessing information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, the level of actual secrecy has been tiered, with corporate interests enjoying far more access to negotiation information than the general public. At the same time, similar intellectual property issues were negotiated in the relative transparency of Congress' debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, allowing for much greater public involvement. With national …

The Chevron Two-Step In Georgia's Administrative Law, David Shipley

Scholarly Works

The Georgia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals have long accepted the General Assembly’s authority to enact legislation that establishes administrative agencies and empowers those agencies to promulgate rules and regulations to implement their enabling statutes. In addition, the Georgia Constitution provides that the General Assembly may authorize agencies to exercise quasi-judicial powers. Administrative agencies with broad powers enjoy a secure position under Georgia law.

Like federal and state administrative agencies throughout the nation, Georgia’s many boards, commissions and authorities make policy when they apply their governing statutes in promulgating regulations of general applicability, and in ruling on specific matters …

Unols Vessels And U.S. Exports Regulations: Seeking A Coherent Solution, Sea Grant Law Fellows

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

When Agencies Go Nuclear: A Game Theoretic Approach To The Biggest Sticks In An Agency's Arsenal, Brigham Daniels

Faculty Scholarship

A regulatory agency’s arsenal often contains multiple weapons. Occasionally, however, an agency has the power to completely obliterate its regulatory targets or to make major waves in society by using a “regulatory nuke.” A regulatory nuke is a tool with two primary characteristics. First, it packs power sufficient to profoundly impact individual regulatory targets or significantly affect important aspects of society or the economy. Second, from the perspective of the regulatory agency, it is politically unavailable in all but the most extreme situations. They are found in many corners of the federal bureaucracy. This Article illustrates that even when individual …

Interstate Competition And The Race To The Top, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Federalism is an essential part of the Constitution’s design. The division of sovereign power between the States and the federal government helps foster interjurisdictional competition, which, in turn, checks government power. Provided a right of exit is maintained, the excessive imposition of economic burdens in one jurisdiction will cause taxpayers and businesses to flee to other jurisdictions. For this reason, federalism often is seen as a friend of the free market.

Provided states cannot externalize the costs of their own policy choices, robust interjurisdictional competition facilitates the enactment of better public policy at the state level. Rather than inducing a …

Concrete Private Interest In Regulatory Enforcement: Tradable Environmental Resource Rights As A Basis For Standing, Danieli Evans

Articles

This Note proposes a novel solution to standing problems faced by environmental plaintifs seeking to enforce, or to compel agencies to enforce, environmental regulation. It argues that environmental plaintifs should be able to obtain standing to bring an Administrative Procedure Act (APA) review action or a citizen suit based on ownership of private tradable environmental resource rights, created by increasingly popular environmental privatization programs. These rights should operate as a basis for standing even for plaintifs who would otherwise be unable to meet standing requirements of individual injury, causation, and redressability. Relying on tradable rights to environmental resources as a …

"Deference" Is Too Confusing – Let's Call Them "Chevron Space" And "Skidmore Weight", Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests an underappreciated, appropriate, and conceptually coherent structure to the Chevron relationship of courts to agencies, grounded in the concept of "allocation." Because the term "deference" muddles rather than clarifies the structure's operation, this Essay avoids speaking of "Chevron deference" and "Skidmore deference." Rather, it argues, one could more profitably think in terms of "Chevron space" and "Skidmore weight." "Chevron space" denotes the area within which an administrative agency has been statutorily empowered to act in a manner that creates legal obligations or constraints – that is, its allocated authority. "Skidmore weight" …

Foreign Administrative Law And International Taxation: A Case Study Of Tax Treaty Implementation In China, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

U.S. taxpayers and the IRS increasingly have to take into account the interactions between U.S. and foreign laws, but they have paid little attention to the administrative law backgrounds of foreign tax laws. In a growing range of cases, the need for such attention has become urgent. This Article describes a novel class of cases encountered by U.S. taxpayers that emanate from tax treaty implementation in China. In these cases, U.S. (and other foreign) investors face certain rules that conflict with common treaty interpretations, and that, at the same time, are not legally binding under Chinese domestic law. The question …

The Case For Abolishing Centralized White House Regulatory Review, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

A series of catastrophic regulatory failures have focused attention on theweakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority have set the stage for ineffective enforcement, unsupervised industry self-regulation, and a slew of devastating and preventable catastrophes. From the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the worst mining disaster in forty years at the Big Branch mine in West Virginia, the signs of regulatory dysfunction abound. Many stakeholders expected that President Barack Obama would recognize and ameliorate …

The End Game Of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management And The Next Catastrophe, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

On December 22, 2008, the contents of an enormous impoundment containing coal-ash slurry from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant poured into the Emory River. The proximate cause of the spill was the bursting of a poorly reinforced dike holding back a pit of sludge that towered 80 feet above the river and 40 feet above an adjacent road. The volume and force of the spill were so large that 1.1 billion gallons of the inky mess flowed across the river, inundating 300 acres of land in a layer four to five feet deep, uprooting trees, destroying …

Montana Administrative Law Practice: 41 Years After The Enactment Of The Montana Administrative Procedure Act, William L. Corbett

Faculty Law Review Articles

No abstract provided.

The Fight Over "Fighting Regs" And Judicial Deference In Tax Litigation, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The question of how much deference courts should accord agency interpretations of statutes is a high-profile and important issue that affects both rulemaking and case outcomes. What level of deference should courts accord an agency regulation or other rule that an agency has issued opportunistically, during the course of related litigation? This important question has arisen in numerous cases, including the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research v. United States, a case involving a Treasury regulation.

To answer the question, the Article analyzes the law on judicial deference to tax authorities generally, as …

Public Input For City Budgeting Using E-Input, Face-To-Face Discussions, And Random Sample Surveys: The Willingness Of An American Community To Increase Taxes, Alan Tomkins, Rick D. Hoppe, Mitch Herian, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Nancy Shank

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Regular public input into a city's budget is frequently associated with municipal budgeting in Brazilian cities, successes in public engagement that have been emulated around the world. American communities are adopting the practice to varying degrees. This paper will report on a five-year old public input program that is taking place in Lincoln, Nebraska, the capital city of a politically conservative state in the U.S. We discuss the processes we use to engage the public about the City's budget. The process includes regular online input as well as face-to-face, deliberative discussions. On occasions, random sample surveys also have been used. …

Meaning, Purpose, And Cause In The Law Of Deception, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Laws designed to affect the flow of information take many forms: rules against misrepresentation, disclosure requirements, secrecy requirements, rules governing the formatting or packaging of information, and interpretive rules designed to give people new reasons to share information. Together these and similar rules constitute the law of deception: laws that aim to prevent or cure deception. One encounters similar problems of design, function and justification throughout the law of deception. Yet very little has been written about the category as a whole. This article begins to sketch a general theory. It identifies three regulatory approaches. Interpretive laws, such as common …

Can Vermont Put The Nuclear Genie Back In The Bottle: A Test Of Congressional Preemptive Power?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Even before the nuclear core meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan re-stoked public anxiety about nuclear energy, Vermont’s Senate, under the auspices of Vermont Act No. 160, voted to block continued operation of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant after the expiration of its forty-year operating license. This article examines whether a state can legislatively override a permit issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extending the license of a power plant. The author places this question within a broader federalism context, in which states assert their sovereign rights to regulate the environment in the shadow of federal mandates. …

Regulatory Techniques And Liability Regimes For Asset Managers, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Marginalizing Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

A major focus of finance is reducing risk on investments, a goal commonly achieved by dispersing the risk among numerous investors. Sometimes, however, risk dispersion can cause investors to underestimate and under-protect against risk. Risk can even be so widely dispersed that rational investors individually lack the incentive to monitor it. This Article examines the market failures resulting from risk dispersion and analyzes when government regulation may be necessary or appropriate to limit these market failures. The Article also examines how such regulation should be designed,including the extent to which it should limit risk dispersion in the first instance.

Understanding Regulatory Capture: An Academic Perspective From The United States, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Although it sometimes seems that financial regulatory agencies have been entirely captured by the larger players in the industry they regulate, a closer examination reveals that a variety of factors contribute to policy outcomes in this arena. Agencies have different agendas and stakeholders, and banks often perform quasi-governmental roles that blur the line between the captors and the captured. The real danger is that public policy can be distorted as a result of excessive influence by one set of interests at the expense of others. This danger is best thwarted or at least mitigated through the application of a range …

A Current Assessment Of Some Extraterritorial Impacts Of The Dodd-Frank Act With Special Focus On The Volcker Rule And Derivatives Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

As the world struggles to emerge from the Global Financial Crisis the vision of a harmonious framework of global financial regulation seems as distant as ever. Important progress made by international committees such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board notwithstanding, there seem to be increasing signs of unilateral, extraterritorial action by major jurisdictions, including the United States. This paper reviews the framework created by the US financial reforms, in particular anti money laundering provisions, the Volcker Rule and the proposed OTC derivatives margin requirements, and considers some of the dilemmas presented by modern global …

The Chevron Two-Step In Georgia's Administrative Law, David E. Shipley

Georgia Law Review

Like federal and state administrative agencies
throughout the nation, Georgia's many boards,
commissions and authorities make policy when they apply
their governing statutes in promulgating regulations and
in ruling on specific matters like granting or denying an
application for a permit or determining the residency of a
candidate for public office. Sometimes governing statutes
are clear, but sometimes there is ambiguity. When there is
ambiguity in the governing statute, an agency must
interpret that legislation when it promulgates regulations
or decides a particular contested matter. This Article asks
and answers the fundamental question of what deference,
if any, must a …

Accountability And The Bureau Of Consumer Financial Protection, Susan Block-Lieb

Faculty Scholarship

Some industry and political actors oppose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on the grounds that its institutional design ensures its lack of accountability. Specifically, opponents point to the CFPB’s regulatory and financial independence and to the fact that a single director heads the Bureau rather than a bipartisan panel of commissioners. But to focus on the Bureau’s financial independence and single director misses the distinctive political deal struck when Congress created the CFPB. The CFPB has been uniquely and intentionally structured to insulate it not only from interest group influence and executive interference, but also from congressional control, while …

Fugitive Emissions: The Marcellus Shale And The Clean Air Act, Joseph Minott, Jonathan Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.