Administrative Law Commons^™

Challenges To The Independence Of Inspectors General In Robust Congressional Oversight, Fernando R. Laguarda

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Congressional oversight of the Executive is among the chief responsibilities of the legislative branch. Inspectors General ("IGs") are among the most important tools available to Congress because they are "hard-wired" into the Executive itself. The value of IGs to Congress depends on their expertise in the workings of their host agencies and their "independence" from those agencies. But "independence" is not a statutorily defined term. As the agencies, and sometimes Congress itself, expand the role of IGs to engage in activities that parallel the regulatory programs of their host agencies, IG independence is compromised and the value IGs provide to …

Strength In Numbers (Of Words): Empirical Analysis Of Preambles And Public Comments, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

The empirical observation of a four-decades-long trend towards longer and longer federal agency rulemakings laid the foundation for this series of studies and associated law review articles. The second in that series, this work will add necessary data, test important hypotheses, and draw new conclusions to guide policymakers. Any serious observer of the Federal Register recognizes that different sections of a rulemaking serve different purposes. And agencies have historically utilized one section in particular to insulate their rules from judicial vacation or remand – the “concise general statement of basis and purpose.” Thus, this new study will collect and analyze …

Payment For Order Flow And The Great Missed Opportunity, Joel Seligman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In late January and early February 2021, an astounding story of stock market price volatility captivated the nation. GameStop, a corporation that in recent years had prodigiously lost money – $492 million two years earlier, $296 million the last year for which it reported data – rose from a low of $2.57 to a high of $483. In January 2021 alone, GameStop had risen from a closing price of $17.25 on January 4 to a close of $347.61 on January 27 before falling 44 percent to a close of $193.60 on January 28, rising 68 percent to a close of …

The Apa And The Assault On Deference, Ronald Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Recently, in Kisor v. Wilkie, a concurring opinion by Justice Gorsuch argued at length that § 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act prohibits judicial deference to administrative interpretations of law. That section states that “the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law.” This issue remained unresolved in Kisor, but the Supreme Court may well return to it soon as a potential argument against the validity of Chevron deference. Although a substantial academic literature has supported Gorsuch’s position on the APA question, this article disagrees with it. It argues that the text of § 706, surrounding statutory provisions, the …

Law & Leviathan: The Best Defense?, Ronald Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In their recent book Law & Leviathan, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule unveil a novel and provocative approach to legitimating the modern administrative state. Their starting point is a set of procedural principles that the legal philosopher Lon Fuller described as fundamental premises of the law’s “internal morality.”

The D.C. Circuit Undermines Direct Final Rulemaking, Ronald Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Twenty-five years ago, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) brought the technique of “direct final rulemaking” to the attention of the administrative law community. Since that time, agencies have used the technique thousands of times to adopt noncontroversial regulations on an expedited basis. But its legality depends on a creative reading of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). A recent D.C. Circuit case, applying the APA in a manner that overlooked the distinctive features of this device, has exposed this vulnerability and may well have seriously undermined the viability of the practice.

This column criticizes a case that came …

Retheorizing Precedent, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

Does the doctrine of stare decisis support judicial attempts to retheorize dubious precedents by putting them on firmer footing? If it does, can retheorization provide a means for Chevron to endure as a staple of administrative law notwithstanding serious challenges to its established rationale?

Wolastoqiyik And Mi’Kmaq Grandmothers - Land/Water Defenders Sharing And Learning Circle: Generating Knowledge For Action, Sherry Pictou, Janet Conway, Angela Day

Reports & Public Policy Documents

This report is a summary of the Grandmothers/Defenders’ stories and are interwoven with corresponding news articles, press releases, and other public documents. This is followed by an overview of some of the critical common issues and importantly, strategies for moving forward proposed by the Grandmothers/Defenders.

The Grandmother’s Report is a collection of stories told by Wolastoqiyik Grandmother/Defenders against the Sisson Mine in New Brunswick and Mi’kmaq Grandmothers against the Alton Gas project in Nova Scotia at the event, Indigenous Grandmothers Sharing and Learning Circle: Generating Knowledge for Action, held at the Tatamagouche Centre in Nova Scotia, January 26 to 27, …

What People Want, What They Get, And The Administrative State, Cristie Ford

All Faculty Publications

Social perceptions of the state and of regulation are badly polarized right now. On one hand, the modern administrative state is under attack. Some modern populists criticize the modern state for being antidemocratic, unaccountable, even tyrannical. Paradoxically, others criticize it for very different reasons: because it is ineffective, or because it binds economies and societies up in “red tape”. On the other hand, the need for a modern, properly-resourced, effective administrative state is also clearer than ever. The financial crisis taught hard lessons about the limits of self-regulation and the need for public sector actors to safeguard the public interest. …

No Ifs, Ands, Or Juuls About It: Why Influencers Must Be Held Accountable, Krystina Dorta

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

This article analyzes how the FTC’s Endorsement Guide regulating the advertising of e-cigarette products should be applied to social media influencers. The struggle to regulate e-cigarettes by the FDA and the FTC has led to different advertising methods, which either comply with or neglect the FTC’s Endorsement Guide. This article evaluates the federal government’s reaction to the e-cigarette health crisis, followed by a review of the FTC’s previous actions addressing Endorsement Guide violations, along with the consequences on other companies’ marketing strategies. Finally, this article reviews influencer liability standards for Endorsement Guide violations and develops recommendations to improve those standards.

Introduction, Daniel A. Crane, Samuel Gregg

Other Publications

The regulation of economic life, whether through law or politics, has been a fixture of daily life from time immemorial. Formal regulation occurs through a variety of formal devices, the efficacy of which is argued about by legal scholars, economists, policymakers, legislators, and governments. Even expressions like “to regulate” or “to deregulate” carry a range of political and even moral connotations, depending on who is using the phrase and how they are deploying it.

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 …

Who Determines Majorness?, Chad Squitieri

Scholarly Articles

The major questions doctrine is said to assist courts in identifying whether Congress has delegated authority to administrative agencies. A closer look at the doctrine, however, reveals that it has been used by courts to tell Congress how it can delegate authority. What is more, some textualists have proposed strengthening the major questions doctrine into a revived nondelegation doctrine, which speaks to whether Congress can delegate authority. This Article argues that the major questions doctrine, particularly in its strengthened form, runs afoul of key commitments of textualism.

Health Reform Reconstruction, Lindsay F. Wiley, Elizabeth Y. Mccuskey, Matthew B. Lawrence, Erin C. Fuse Brown

Faculty Articles

This Article connects the failed, inequitable U.S. coronavirus pandemic response to conceptual and structural constraints that have held back U.S health reform for decades and calls for reconstruction. For more than a half-century, a cramped “iron triangle” ethos has constrained health reform conceptually. Reforms aimed to balance individual interests in cost, quality, and access to health care, while marginalizing equity, solidarity, and public health. In the iron triangle era, reforms unquestioningly accommodated four legally and logistically entrenched fixtures — individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism — that distort and diffuse any reach toward social justice. The profound racial disparities and …

Of Sheepdogs And Ventriloquists: Government Lawyers In Two New Deal Agencies, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the neo-Weberian literature on state-building and the political sociology of the legal profession, one might expect government lawyers to be sheepdogs, nipping at the heels of straying administrators, supplying their agencies with the bureaucratic autonomy so often missing in American government. In this contribution to “Serious Fun” a symposium in honor of John Henry Schlegel of the University at Buffalo School of Law, I report my preliminary findings for two agencies created during the Hundred Days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Recovery Administration. I suggest that the neo-Weberian model tends to minimize …

Delegation, Administration, And Improvisation, Kevin Arlyck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Nondelegation originalism is having its moment. Recent Supreme Court opinions suggest that a majority of justices may be prepared to impose strict constitutional limits on Congress’s power to delegate policymaking authority to the executive branch. In response, scholars have scoured the historical record for evidence affirming or refuting a more stringent version of nondelegation than current Supreme Court doctrine demands. Though the debate ranges widely, sharp disputes have arisen over whether a series of apparently broad Founding-era delegations defeat originalist arguments in favor of a more stringent modern doctrine. Proponents—whom I call “nondelegationists”—argue that these historical delegations can all be …

Federal Courts: Art. Iii(1), Art. I(8), Art. Iv(3)(2), Art. Ii(2)/I(8)(3), And Art. Ii(1) Adjudication, Laura K. Donohue, Jeremy M. Mccabe

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The distinction among the several types of federal courts in the United States has gone almost unremarked in the academic literature. Instead, attention focuses on Article III “constitutional” courts with occasional discussion of how they differ from what are referred to as “non-constitutional” or “legislative” courts. At best, these labels are misleading: all federal courts have a constitutional locus, and most, but not all, federal courts are brought into being via legislation. The binary approach further ignores the full range of federal courts, which are rooted in different constitutional provisions: Art. III(1), Art. I(8); Art. IV(3); Art. II(2)/I(8)(3); and Art. …

Sanctuary Cities And The Power Of The Purse: An Executive Dole Test, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

A constitutional clash is brewing. Cities and counties are flexing their muscles to frustrate national immigration policy while the federal Executive is threatening to interfere with local law enforcement decision making and funding. Although the federal government generally has plenary authority over immigration law, the Constitution forbids the commandeering of state and local officials to enforce federal law against their will. One exception to this anti-commandeering principle is the Spending Clause of Article I that permits Congress to condition the receipt of federal funds on compliance with federal law. These conditions, according to more than 30 years of Supreme Court …

Environmental Law, Disrupted By Covid-19, Rebecca Bratspies, Vanessa Casado Peréz, Robin Kundis Craig, Lissa Griffin, Sarah Krakoff, Keith Hirokawa, Katrina Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J. B. Ruhl, Erin Ryan, David Takacs

Publications

For over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about systemic racial injustice have highlighted the conflicts and opportunities currently faced by environmental law. Scientists uniformly predict that environmental degradation, notably climate change, will cause a rise in diseases, disproportionate suffering among communities already facing discrimination, and significant economic losses. In this Article, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative examine the legal system’s responses to these crises, with the goal of framing opportunities to reimagine environmental law. The Article is excerpted from their book Environmental Law, Disrupted, to be published by ELI Press later this year.

Algorithmic Impact Assessments Under The Gdpr: Producing Multi-Layered Explanations, Margot E. Kaminski, Gianclaudio Malgieri

Publications

Policy-makers, scholars, and commentators are increasingly concerned with the risks of using profiling algorithms and automated decision-making. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has tried to address these concerns through an array of regulatory tools. As one of us has argued, the GDPR combines individual rights with systemic governance, towards algorithmic accountability. The individual tools are largely geared towards individual “legibility”: making the decision-making system understandable to an individual invoking her rights. The systemic governance tools, instead, focus on bringing expertise and oversight into the system as a whole, and rely on the tactics of “collaborative governance,” that is, …

Guidance On Presidential Records By The National Archives And Records Administration, David S. Ferriero

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

How the Presidential Records Act Affects the President, Vice President, and White House Staff During the Administration

Overview

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, as amended, 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201-2209, governs the official records of Presidents and Vice Presidents created on or received after January 20, 1981. The PRA changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public.

The PRA established a new statutory structure under which Presidents must manage their records. The Presidential Records Act:

 Defines and states public ownership of the records;

 Places the responsibility for the custody and …

Presidential Primacy Amidst Democratic Decline, Ashraf Ahmed, Karen M. Tani

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, when the Harvard Law Review asked Professor Harry Kalven, Jr., to take stock of the Supreme Court’s 1970 Term, Kalven faced a task not unlike Professor Cristina Rodríguez’s. That Term’s Court had two new members, Justices Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger. The Nixon Administration was young, but clearly bent on making its own stamp on American law, including via the Supreme Court. Kalven thus expected to see “dislocations” when he reviewed the Court’s recent handiwork. He reported the opposite. Surveying a Term that included such cases as Palmer v. Thompson, Younger v. Harris, Boddie v. …

Courts Beyond Judging, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

Across all fifty states, a woefully understudied institution of government is responsible for a broad range of administrative, legislative, law enforcement, and judicial functions. That important institution is the state courts. While the literature has examined the federal courts and federal judges from innumerable angles, study of the state courts as institutions of state government — and not merely as sources of doctrine and resolvers of disputes — has languished. This Article remedies that oversight by drawing attention for the first time to the wide array of roles state courts serve, and by evaluating the suitability of both the allocation …

The Three Permissions: Presidential Removal And The Statutory Limits Of Agency Independence, Jane Manners, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

Seven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen “independent agencies”: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfea­sance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and only INM. But neither Congress nor the courts have defined INM and hence the extent of agency independence. Stepping into this void, some proponents of presidential power argue that INM allows the President to dismiss officials who do not follow presidential directives. Others contend that INM is unconstitutional because it prevents Presidents from fulfilling their duty to take care that the laws are faithfully …

The Federal Reserve And The 2020 Economic And Financial Crisis, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the Federal Reserve's response to the 2020 economic and financial crisis. First, it examines the sixteen ad hoc lending facilities that the Fed established to fight the crisis and sorts them into two categories. Six advance the Fed's monetary mission and were designed to halt a run on financial institutions. Ten go beyond the Fed's traditional role and are designed to directly support financial markets and the real economy. Second, it maps these programs onto the statutory framework for money and banking. It shows that Congress's signature crisis legislation, the CARES Act, …

Majestic Law And The Subjective Stop, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

Justice John Paul Stevens subscribed to "a majestic conception" of the Constitution. This Article articulates and defends that vision. Majestic law and legal reasoning characteristically involve frank moral reasoning, such as one finds in the Eighth Amendment's "evolving standards of decency" test for proportionate punishment, or in Due Process formulations such as an appeal to "immutable principles of justice, which inhere in the very idea of free government." Majestic law employs moral values, norms, and judgments in legal reasoning, taking them on their own terms. Majestic legal reasoning does not weigh revealed preferences for decency, for example. It asks whether …

Presidential Progress On Climate Change: Will The Courts Interfere With What Needs To Be Done To Save Our Planet?, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The Biden Administration is undertaking numerous actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition away from fossil fuels as part of the fight against climate change. Many of these actions are likely to be challenged in court. This paper describes the various legal theories that are likely to be used in these challenges, assesses their prospects of success given the current composition of the Supreme Court, and suggests ways to minimize the risks.

The Uncertain Future Of Administrative Law, Jeremy K. Kessler, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

A volatile series of presidential transitions has only intensified the century-long conflict between progressive defenders and conservative critics of the administrative state. Yet neither side has adequately confronted the fact that the growth of uncertainty and the corresponding spread of guidance – a kind of provisional “rule” that invites its own revision – mark a break in the development of the administrative state as significant as the rise of notice-and-comment rulemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas rulemaking corrected social shortsightedness by enlisting science in the service of lawful administration, guidance acknowledges that both science and law are in need …

Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica K. Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

In a revolutionary moment for the legal profession, the deregulation of legal services is taking hold in many parts of the country. Utah and Arizona, for instance, are experimenting with new regulations that permit nonlawyer advocates to play an active role in assisting citizens who may not otherwise have access to legal services. In addition, amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct in both states, as well as those being contemplated in California, now allow nonlawyers to have a partnership stake in law firms, which may dramatically change the way capital for the delivery of legal services is raised as …

Re-Reading Chevron, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Though increasingly disfavored by the Supreme Court, Chevron remains central to administrative law doctrine. This Article suggests a way for the Court to reformulate the Chevron doctrine without overruling the Chevron decision. Through careful attention to the language of Chevron itself, the Court can honor the decision’s underlying value of harnessing comparative institutional advantage in judicial review, while setting aside a highly selective reading that unduly narrows judicial review. This re-reading would put the Chevron doctrine – and with it, an entire branch of administrative law – on firmer footing.