Administrative Law Commons^™

Federal Grant Rules And Realities In The Intergovernmental Administrative State: Compliance, Performance, And Politics, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Federal grants are one of the government’s most important policy tools. While high-profile debates about constitutional coercion, entitlement reform, and budget cuts receive most of the public attention given to federal grants, a more prosaic but equally important reality describes the operation of these grants on the ground: the web of detailed rules and massive enforcement structure devoted to the administrative side of federal grants, which this Article refers to as “the grants-management regime.” Unacknowledged in the legal literature, the grants-management regime drives the implementation of federal grants and tells a very different story than the standard concern about feckless …

The Disability Dilemma: Difficulties Involving Erisa Claims For Subjective-Proof Diseases, Courtney D. Keeling

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreign Corruption As Market Manipulation, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Individual Preferences In Policy Analysis: A Normative Framework, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

Measures of individual preferences are a key input in cost-benefit analysis. However, behavioral science has raised questions about the rationality of these preferences. The Nudge thesis relies on that scientific research to prescribe interventions to influence individual choices. However, the more modest step of limiting reliance on these preferences in evaluating non-paternalistic government policies has not been taken up. We lack a consistent theory of when public policy should defer to these preferences, with legal and policy advocates adopting ad hoc result-oriented approaches. I argue that policymakers should be prepared to override individual preferences in cases where their only plausible …

The Other Hobbs Act: An Old Leviathan In The Modern Administrative State, Jason N. Sigalos

Georgia Law Review

The Hobbs Administrative Orders Review Act is a
little-known statute, one that is often mistaken for a
federal criminal statute with a similar name.
The lesser-known Hobbs Act requires aggrieved parties
to challenge certain agency orders in a federal court of
appeals within sixty days of the order’s promulgation.
However, if no party does so, are later parties bound by
a potentially unlawful agency order in subsequent
enforcement actions? The U.S. Supreme Court recently
dodged this question in PDR Network, LLC v. Carlton
& Harris Chiropractic, Inc. That case concerned a suit
between two private parties under the Telephone
Consumer …

Coequal Federalism And Federal-State Agencies, Dave Owen, Hannah J. Wiseman

Georgia Law Review

Dividing authority between the federal government and the
states is central to the theory and practice of federalism.
Division is the defining feature of dual federalism, which
dominates the U.S. Supreme Court’s federalism
jurisprudence. Recent academic theories of federalism
emphasize overlap and interaction but still assume that
federal and state actors will work within separate institutions.
Each approach can be problematic, yet assumptions of
separation remain the bedrock of federalism. This Article
discusses a different form of federalism: coequal federalism.
Under coequal federalism, federal- and state-appointed
officials collaborate within a single agency that makes
decisions binding on the federal government …

Reckoning With Adjudication's Exceptionalism Norm, Emily S. Bremer

Journal Articles

Unlike rulemaking and judicial review, administrative adjudication is governed by a norm of exceptionalism. Agencies rarely adjudicate according to the Administrative Procedure Act’s formal adjudication provisions, and the statute has little role in defining informal adjudication or specifying its minimum procedural requirements. Due process has almost nothing to say about the matter.

The result is that there are few uniform, cross-cutting procedural requirements in adjudication, and most hearings are conducted using procedures tailored for individual agencies or programs. This Article explores the benefits and costs of adjudication’s exceptionalism norm, an analysis that implicates the familiar tension between uniformity and specialization …

Contingent Delisting, Justin R. Pidot

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Public Purpose Finance: The Government's Role As Lender, Nadav Orian Peer

Publications

This Article explores the workings of Public Purpose Finance, and its role within the U.S. political economy. “Public Purpose Finance” (PPF) refers to the broad range of institutions through which the government extends credit to private borrowers in sectors like housing, education, agriculture and small business. At a total of $10 trillion, PPF roughly equals the entire U.S. corporate bond market, and is around one half of the U.S. Gross national debt (2018 figures). The Article begins by surveying and quantifying the scope of PPF. It then demonstrates that PPF enjoys a considerable degree of insulation from the federal budgetary …

Administrative Law's Extraordinary Cases, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The Supreme Court's major questions doctrine is grounded in the Chevron framework. Reconstituting it as a "major rules" exception to Chevron or as a non-delegation principle are misguided and create greater uncertainty.

How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change “Novel” Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

The use of guidance documents in administrative law has long been controversial and considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of administrative law. When an agency uses a guidance document to change or make policy, it need not provide notice to the public or allow comment on the new rule; this makes changes easier and faster and less subject to judicial review. Under the Obama Administration, guidance documents were used to implement policy shifts in many areas of administrative law, including civil rights issues such as transgender inclusion and campus sexual harassment and immigration law issues such as …

Citizenship Denied: Implications Of The Naturalization Backlog For Noncitizens In The Military, Ming H. Chen

Publications

The immigration system is in crisis. Long lines of asylum seekers at the border and immigrants in the interior spend years waiting for their day in immigration court. This is true in the agencies that process applications for immigration benefits from legal immigrants as well. Since 2016, delays in naturalization have increased to historic proportions. The problem is even worse for military naturalizations, where delays are accompanied by denials and overall declines in military naturalizations. It is the latest front in the battle on legal migration and citizenship.

These impediments to citizenship demonstrate an extreme form of policies collectively dubbed …

Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair, Ming H. Chen

Publications

No abstract provided.

Remutualization, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Policymakers need to rediscover the organizational form of business entity as a tool of financial regulation. Recent and classic scholarship has produced evidence that financial institutions organized as alternative entity forms – including investment bank partnerships and banks and insurance companies organized as mutual or cooperatives – tend to take less risk, exploit customers/consumer less, or commit less misconduct compared to counterparts organized as investor-owned corporations. This article builds off the work of Hill and Painter on investment banks organized as partnerships, Hansmann on the history and economics of banks and insurance companies organized as mutuals and cooperatives, and other …

Regulatory De-Arbitrage In Twenty-First Century Cures Act's Health Information Regulation, Craig Konnoth

Publications

Health data regulation can be thought of at two levels. First, the micro- level of regulation has to do with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Second, the macro-level concerns the networks on which EHRs are transmitted. The micro- and macro-levels of regulation interact. For example, EHRs need to be configured so that they can be transmitted on mandated networks. As a result, the lines do sometimes blur.

That said, the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures) clearly takes a dual approach to regulation. Cures was passed in December 2016 on a bipartisan basis. Its mandate was to address health data regulation at …

Delegation And Time, Jonathan H. Adler, Christopher J. Walker

Faculty Publications

Most concerns about delegation are put in terms of the handover of legislative power to federal agencies and the magnitude of the legislative policy decisions made by such agencies. Likewise, most reform proposals, such as the Congressional Review Act and the proposed REINS Act, address these gap-filling, democratic deficit concerns. The same is true of the judicially created nondelegation canons, such as the major questions doctrine and other clear statement rules. This Article addresses a different, underexplored dimension of the delegation problem: the temporal complications of congressional delegation. In other words, broad congressional delegations of authority at one time period …