Administrative Law Commons^™

Interpreting An Unamendable Text, Thomas W. Merrill

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many of the most important legal texts in the United States are highly unamendable. This applies not only to the Constitution, which has not been amended in over forty years, but also to many framework statutes, like the Administrative Procedure Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act. The problem is becoming increasingly severe, as political polarization makes amendment of these texts even more unlikely. This Article considers how interpreters should respond to highly unamendable texts. Unamendable texts have a number of pathologies, such as excluding the people and their representatives from any direct participation in legal change. They also pose an …

High‐Frequency Trading And The New Stock Market: Sense And Nonsense, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel V. Rauterberg

Articles

The stock market has been transformed during the last 25 years. Human suppliers of liquidity like the NASDAQ dealers and NYSE specialists have been replaced by algorithmic market making; stocks that once traded on a single venue now trade across twelve exchanges and a multitude of alternative trading systems. New venues like dark pools, and new participants like high‐frequency traders, have emerged to take on prominent roles. This new market has had more than its share of controversy and regulatory scrutiny, particularly in the wake of Michael Lewis’s bestseller Flash Boys. In this article, the authors analyze five of the …

Felton V. Douglas County, 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 6 (Feb. 15, 2018), Joshua Garry

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that when an uncompensated volunteer, who has concurrent private employment and is injured during the course of volunteer work, shall have their average monthly wage for the purposes of workers’ compensation benefits to be the aggregate of the “deemed wage” provided by statute along with their earnings from the concurrent private employment.

Creating Mischief: The Tenth Circuit Declares The Sec’S Administrative Law Judges Unconstitutional In Bandimere V. Securities Exchange Commission, Casey M. Olesen

Maine Law Review

Since the passage of the APA, administrative agencies’ use of Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) to preside over hearings has exploded, and now far outpaces the number trials conducted before federal judges. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is one such agency that heavily utilizes ALJs to conduct their hearings. Recently, following an apparent higher percentage of SEC wins before their own ALJs as compared to before federal judges, a new constitutional challenge on the basis of the Appointments Clause has been brought before several circuits; that the SEC’s ALJs are inferior officers of the SEC, not employees, and therefore are …

Tax Increment Financing In Maine, Michael G. Walker

Maine Law Review

Tax Increment Financing ("TIF") is a statutorily authorized mechanism which enables municipalities to earmark the property tax revenue from designated areas to pay for things such as infrastructure improvement. Lately, Maine municipalities have been using TIF to refund tax revenues directly to private developers in an effort to attract new business. This Comment will begin by briefly explaining the development of TIF in the United States and how it has evolved over time. It will then summarize how TIF works in Maine and the criticism and praise it has received throughout its existence. Next, it will look at research examining …

Delegating For Trust, Edward H. Stiglitz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Courts and legal observers have long been concerned by the scope of authority delegated to administrative agencies. The dominant explanation of delegated authority is that it is necessary to take advantage of administrative agencies' expertise and expansive rulemaking capacity. Though this explanation makes sense in many settings, it falters in many areas and has given rise to a number of longstanding puzzles, such as why Congress does not invest in its own institutional capacity.

Unrecognized in this debate over the puzzles of delegation is that Congress may delegate to take advantage of another distinctive attribute of administrative decisionmaking: the credible …

Grasping For Energy Democracy, Shelley Welton

Michigan Law Review

Until recently, energy law has attracted relatively little citizen participation. Instead, Americans have preferred to leave matters of energy governance to expert bureaucrats. But the imperative to respond to climate change presents energy regulators with difficult choices over what our future energy sources should be, and how quickly we should transition to them—choices that are outside traditional regulatory expertise. For example, there are currently robust nationwide debates over what role new nuclear power plants and hydraulically fractured natural gas should play in our energy mix, and over how to maintain affordable energy for all while rewarding those who choose to …

"Too Big To Foia": How Agencies Avoid Compliance With The Freedom Of Information Act, Stephanie Alvarez-Jones

Cardozo Law Review

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while foundational for promoting government transparency, faces significant challenges in its administration, particularly through the judicially created "undue burden" claim, which allows agencies to evade disclosure. The note argues that courts' deference to agencies' claims of undue burden undermines FOIA's purpose of promoting openness. It proposes reforms, such as a public interest sliding scale, to balance the burden on agencies against the public's right to know, ensuring FOIA remains an effective tool for accountability.

Appeal No. 0945: Mark & Marie Hill Division Of Oil & Gas Resources Management & Antero Resources Corporation, Ohio Oil & Gas Commission

Ohio Oil & Gas Commission Decisions

Review of Chief's Order 2017-153 (Otto Unit) & Chief's Order 2017-168 (Reich Unit)

Appeal No. 0944: Mark & Marie Hill Division Of Oil & Gas Resources Management & Antero Resources Corporation, Ohio Oil & Gas Commission

Ohio Oil & Gas Commission Decisions

Review of Chief's Order 2017-153 (Otto Unit) & Chief's Order 2017-168 (Reich Unit)

California V. United States Bureau Of Land Management, Molly M. Kelly

Public Land & Resources Law Review

After President Trump’s Executive Order No. 13783 encouraging relaxing regulatory burdens on energy production, the Bureau of Land Management reevaluated its 2016 “Waste Prevention Rule” which addressed waste of natural gas from venting, flaring, or other leaks resulting from oil and natural gas production activities. The BLM sought to postpone the Rule’s compliance date to give the agency time to promulgate a new rule—effectively overruling the 2016 Rule. Plaintiffs challenged the agency’s compliance under the Administrative Procedures Act, and the court found the BLM did not properly follow APA requirements.

Do It In The Sunshine: A Comparative Analysis Of Rulemaking Procedures And Transparency Practices Of Lawyer-Licensing Entities, Bobbi Jo Boyd

Arkansas Law Review

Regulation of occupational licensing has garnered national attention. During the last sixty years, the number of occupations regulated by governmental entities has notably increased. As the number of regulated occupations increases, employment opportunities and wages for individuals who cannot afford or otherwise meet licensing requirements decrease.

Hb 338 - Turnaround Elligible Schools, Eleanor F. Miller, Heather E. Obelgoner

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act creates the position of Chief Turnaround Officer (CTO) and authorizes the State Board of Education, in collaboration with the State School Superintendent and the Education Turnaround Advisory Council, to search for and appoint the CTO. The CTO has the authority to recommend individuals to serve as turnaround coaches upon approval by the state board. The Act defines the term “turnaround eligible schools” and identifies factors upon which the CTO may identify such schools. The Act provides procedures by which the CTO and turnaround coaches shall intervene in such schools. The Act creates the Education Turnaround Advisory Council, which …

Hb 434 - Eminent Domain, Ashley M. Bowcott, Derek M. Schwahn

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act amends Georgia’s eminent domain laws by providing an exception to the general rule that condemnations cannot be converted to any use, other than a public use, for twenty years. The Act creates a new procedure which requires the condemnor to petition the jurisdiction’s superior court to determine whether the property is blighted property. Additionally, the condemnor must provide notice to all owners of the alleged blighted property. If the court finds the land is blighted property, the condemnor must file a petition to condemn the property according to the established procedure set forth in Article 3 Chapter 2 …

Hb 249 - Controlled Substances And Prescription Drug Monitoring Database, Emily R. Polk, Brandon M. Reed

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act amends Georgia’s controlled-substances statutes to expand medical provider requirements to record prescription drug information in an electronic prescription drug monitoring program database (PDMP). Medical providers are now required to use the PDMP to enter information about their prescription of certain types and quantities of opioids. The purpose of the act is to fight Schedule II opioid abuse throughout the state of Georgia. A medical provider’s failure to report required information is reported to his or her respective state regulatory board for possible reprimand. In addition to mandatory reporting, the Act includes various other provisions related to regulating opioid …

Heat & Frost Insulators & Allied Workers Loc. 16 V. Lab. Comm’R; Univ. Of Nev., Reno; & Core Constr., 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 1 (Jan. 4, 2018), Alma Orozco

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

NRS 233B.130(2)(c)(1)’s service requirement is mandatory and jurisdictional. Further, under NRS 233B.130(5), the district court has jurisdiction to extend time for service for good cause, either before or after the 45-day service period has run.

Mental Injury And Reasonable Administrative Action Green And Comcare -- Case Note, Philip Evans

The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Justice Cardozo’S Opinions On The Constitutionality Of The New Deal, Robert J. Pushaw Jr

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tax As Part Of A Broken Budget: Good Taxes Are Good Cause Enough, Stephanie Mcmahon

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The federal budget is a myth. Despite being a myth, Congress uses the budget to limit its choices by linking its revenue-raising and spending powers under a federal debt ceiling. Through its self-imposed limits, Congress puts tremendous pressure on how it calculates its budget, and that calculation generally assumes any tax provisions will raise revenue when the law becomes effective. However, many tax provisions require additional direction to ensure they operate as the budgetary process expects. That task falls to the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a bureau of the Department. Consequently, limiting the production of …

The Brand-X Effect: Declining Chevron Deference In The 21st Century, Stephen Johnson

Articles

Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. is the most frequently cited Supreme Court administrative law decision and has generated substantial scholarship over the past thirty-four ears. Almost three decades ago, Robert Glicksman and Christopher Schroeder examined the nature of judicial review of the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") by the federal courts during the agency's first twenty years of existence, focusing, in part, on the changing nature of that review in light of the Chevron decision. Glicksman and Schroeder concluded that the courts aggressively reviewed EPA's actions during the agency's early years, interpreting the …

Administrative License Renewal And Due Process -- A Case Study, Delcianna J. Winders

Florida State University Law Review

Scholars have recently noted the paucity of scholarship on administrative licenses as especially significant given the prevalence-indeed ubiquity-of administrative licenses today.This Article contributes to filling that void by tackling an aspect of administrative licensing that has received especially little attention and, as a result, has been a source of serious confusion: license renewals. As this Article details, administrative license renewal practices raise interesting and important questions about administrative law and procedural due process. Does one have a property interest in a license after that license expires by its terms? Is an agency's decision not to renew a license more akin …

The Tortoise And The Hare Of International Data Privacy Law: Can The United States Catch Up To Rising Global Standards?, Matthew Humerick

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Technological developments spur the development of big data on a global scale. The breadth of data companies collect, maintain, process, and transmit affects nearly every country and organization around the world. Inherent to big data are issues of data protection and transfers to third countries. While many jurisdictions emphasize the importance of protecting consumer data, such as the European Union, others, like the United States, do not. To circumvent this issue, the United States and European Union contracted around data privacy standard discrepancies through the Safe Harbor Agreement, which eased cross-border data transfers. However, the Court of Justice of the …

The Limits Of Copyright Office Expertise, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

The mismatch between the expanding administrative and regulatory obligations of the United States Copyright Office and its limited institutional expertise is an emerging problem for the copyright system. The Office’s chief responsibility—registration and recordation of copyright claims—has taken a back seat in recent years to a more ambitious set of substantive rulemakings and policy recommendations. As the triennial rulemaking under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act highlights, the Office is frequently called upon to answer technological questions far beyond its plausible claims of subject matter expertise. This Article traces the Office’s history, identifies its substantial but discrete areas of expertise, and …

Auer Evasions, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

Auer v. Robbins requires federal courts to defer to federal agency interpretations of ambiguous regulations. Auer built upon, and arguably expanded, the Court’s long-standing practice of deferring to agency interpretations of their own regulations born in Bowles v. Seminole Rock. Although initially uncontroversial, the doctrine has come under fire from legal commentators and prominent jurists, including Auer’s author, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. As Justice Scalia came to recognize, Auer deference enables agencies to evade a wide range of legal constraints that are otherwise imposed upon agency behavior, the ability of agencies to take action with the force …

Masterpiece Cakeshop: “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”, 52 Uic J. Marshall L. Rev. 83 (2018), Ted Hong

UIC Law Review

The purpose of this article is to highlight the less controversial part of the Court’s opinion. This article is intended for counsel representing parties before federal, state, municipal and local administrative agencies, counsel representing administrative agencies and people serving on administrative agencies. The article discusses how the Masterpiece Cakeshop opinion was the culmination of discussing the role of procedural due process in the administrative agency process. The Court’s opinion has “real time” application in a current case before the Intermediate Court of Appeals, State of Hawai`i. This article also highlights the difference in appointment of boards and commissioners in three …

Clowning Around With Final Agency Action, Beau J. Baumann, Greg Mina

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

While Chevron and Auer deference dominate the administrative law literature, another doctrine—the final agency action requirement—has been perverted by the lower federal courts. Several circuits have developed an undergrowth of formalistic rules that tighten the Supreme Court’s standard, as it was laid out in Bennett v. Spear. This development ignores the Court’s decades-old refrain that the final agency action requirement should be flexible. Unfortunately, this development comes at the worst possible time. The interconnectedness of federal and state agencies has led to a sort of division of labor. Data collection, designations, and enforcement are increasingly divided across different agencies. Because …

State Standing In United States V. Texas: Opening The Floodgates To States Challenging The Federal Government Or Proper Federalism?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In United States v. Texas, the Supreme Court by an equally divided vote, 4 to 4, affirmed the decision of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the State of Texas had Article III standing to challenge in federal court the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) directive establishing a Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (“DAPA”) program to grant lawful immigration status to millions of undocumented immigrants. A serious question is whether state standing in this case will open the floodgates to allow states to challenge virtually every federal executive action. On the other hand, …

Federal Circuit Jurisdiction: Looking Back And Thinking Forward, Timothy B. Dyk

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Are “Officers Of The United States”?, Jennifer L. Mascott

Scholarly Articles

For decades courts have believed that only officials with “significant authority” are “Officers of the United States” subject to the Constitution’s Article II Appointments Clause requirements. But this standard has proved difficult to apply to major categories of officials. This Article examines whether “significant authority” is even the proper standard, at least as that standard has been applied in modern practice. To uncover whether the modern understanding of the term “officer” is consistent with the term’s original public meaning, this Article uses two distinctive tools: (i) corpus linguistics-style analysis of Founding-era documents and (ii) examination of appointment practices during the …

The Missing Element Of Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis: Compensation For The Loss Of Regulatory Benefits, Karl S. Coplan

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Despite its critics, cost-benefit analysis remains a fixture of the environmental regulation calculus. Most criticisms of cost-benefit analysis focus on the impossibility of monetizing environmental and health amenities protected by regulations. Less attention has been paid to the regressive wealth-transfer effects of regulations foregone based on cost-benefit analysis. This regressive effect occurs as long as downwind communities that suffer health and harms from environmental contamination are generally less wealthy than the owners of pollution sources that avoid regulatory-compliance costs. The availability of compensation to pollution-victims has the potential to ameliorate this regressive effect. This Article recommends that the availability of …