Administrative Law Commons^™

Chevron For Juries, William Ortman

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Procedural Triage, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Prior scholarship has assumed that the inherent value of a “day in court” is the same for all claimants, so that when procedural resources (like a jury trial or a hearing) are scarce, they should be rationed the same way for all claimants. That is incorrect. This Article shows that the inherent value of a “day in court” can be far greater for some claimants, such as first-time filers, than for others, such as corporate entities and that it can be both desirable and feasible to take this variation into account in doling out scarce procedural protections. In other words, …

Searching For Proportionality In U.S. Administrative Law, Jud Mathews

Contributions to Books

There is no such thing as “proportionality review” in American administrative law, but instead, a number of doctrines that courts deploy to evaluate agency exercises of discretion. In some respects, these frameworks for review resemble proportionality in operation, but there are also notable differences. This essay surveys the doctrines governing judicial review of administrative discretion in the United States, highlighting three distinguishing features of the American approach. First, American judicial review is characterized by a high degree of unpredictability, not only with respect to outcomes, but often with respect to what framework of review is applicable. Second, while classical proportionality …

Selling Chevron, Christine Chabot

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

A Taxonomy Of Discretion: Refining The Legality Debate About Obama’S Executive Actions On Immigration, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

Broad executive action has been the Obama Administration’s signature contribution to American immigration policy, setting off a furious debate about whether the President has acted outside his constitutional powers. But the legal debate about the scope of the President’s authority to change immigration policy has not fully recognized what is actually innovative about the Obama policies, and thus has not focused on those areas where he has taken executive discretion into uncharted territory. This essay aims to add new focus to the debate about Pres. Obama’s executive actions by defining five different types of presidential discretion: Congressionally-authorized discretion, non-enforcement discretion, …

Choosing A Court To Review The Executive, Joseph Mead, Nicholas Fromherz

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

For more than one hundred years, Congress has experimented with review of agency action by single-judge district courts, multiple-judge district courts, and direct review by circuit courts. This tinkering has not given way to a stable design. Rather than settling on a uniform scheme—or at least a scheme with a discernible organizing principle—Congress has left litigants with a jurisdictional maze that varies unpredictably across and within statutes and agencies.In this Article, we offer a fresh look at the theoretical and empirical factors that ought to inform the allocation of the judicial power between district and circuit courts in suits challenging …

Market Intermediation, Publicness, And Securities Class Actions, Hillary A. Sale, Robert B. Thompson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Securities class actions play a crucial, if contested, role in the policing of securities fraud and the protection of securities markets. The theoretical understanding of these private enforcement claims needs to evolve to encompass the broader set of goals that underlie the securities regulatory impulse and the publicness of those goals. Further, a clear grasp of the modern securities class action also requires an updated understanding of how the role of market intermediation in securities transactions has reshaped the realities of securities litigation in public companies and the evolution of the fraud cause of action in the context of open-market …

Improving Claims Resolution: Alternative Processes In Canada's Immigration System, Nicole M. Melanson

LLM Theses

This thesis argues that alternative dispute resolution processes form a vital part of Canada's immigration and refugee claims determination system. Using an analytical framework that draws on dispute resolution and relational feminist theory, it explores how alternative processes provide advantages over adversarial ones for claims that engage issues of power and relationships. By aligning claims with appropriate processes, system administrators can improve the fairness, efficiency and durability of resolutions. Introductory Chapters describe the administrative law structure that governs immigration and refugee claims in Canada, and the Immigration Appeal Division's Early Resolution program. This unique initiative integrates alternative processes into the …

You Get What You Pay For: The Nfip Is Underwater And Climate Change Adaptation Is Essential To Reach Dry Land, Alana Dietel

Florida A & M University Law Review

Climate change is a reality, and Florida is uniquely situated to feel its effects sooner than other states. This is due to the prediction of a substantially rising sea level and the fact that a majority of the most populated and popular areas in Florida are located along or near the coasts. Part I of this article examines the realities of climate change. Part II reviews the current state of the most significant attempt at flood insurance by the Federal government, the NFIP. Part II also reviews Florida’s statewide initiatives, as well as local initiatives of three distinct Florida counties. …

Cologna V. Board Of Trustees, Police & Firemen’S Retirement System, Erik W. Lane

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Longstanding Agency Interpretations, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

How much deference — or what kind — should courts give to longstanding agency interpretations of statutes? Surprisingly, courts and scholars lack a coherent answer to this question. Legal scholars long have assumed that longstanding agency statutory interpretations are treated with heightened deference on judicial review, and federal courts sometimes have made statements suggesting that this is the case. But in practice, federal court review of longstanding agency interpretations — at both the Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court levels — turns out to be surprisingly erratic. Reviewing courts sometimes note the longevity of an agency’s statutory interpretation …

Administering Patent Litigation, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Recent patent litigation reform efforts have focused on every branch of government — Congress, the President, and the federal courts — save the fourth: administrative agencies. Agencies, however, possess a variety of functions in patent litigation: they serve as “gatekeepers” to litigation in federal court; they provide scientific and technical expertise to patent disputes; they review patent litigation to fulfill their own mandates; and they serve, in several instances, as entirely alternative fora to federal litigation. Understanding administrative agencies’ functions in managing or directing, i.e., “administrating,” patent litigation sheds both descriptive and normative insight on several aspects of patent reform. …

Administrating Patent Litigation, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Recent patent litigation reform efforts have focused on every branch of govemment-Congress, the President, and the federal courts-save the fourth: administrative agencies. Agencies, however, possess a variety of functions in patent litigation: they serve as "gatekeepers" to litigation in federal court; they provide scientific and technical expertise to patent disputes; they review patent litigation to fulfill their own mandates; and they serve, in several instances, as entirely alternative fora to federal litigation.

Understanding administrative agencies' functions in managing or directing, i.e., "administrating," patent litigation sheds both descriptive and normative insight on several aspects of patent reform. These include several problems …

Regleprudence – At Oira And Beyond, Nestor M. Davidson, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

There are significant domains of legality within the administrative state that are mostly immune from judicial review and have mostly escaped the attention of legal theorists. While administrative law generally focuses on the products of agency action as they are reviewed by the judiciary, there are important aspects of regulatory activity that are legal or law-like but rarely interrogated by systematic analysis with reference to accounts about the role and nature of law. In this Article, we introduce a category of analysis we call "regleprudence," a sibling of jurisprudence and legisprudence. Once we explore some regleprudential norms, we delve into …

The Judgment Fund: America's Deepest Pocket & Its Susceptibility To Executive Branch Misuse, Paul F. Figley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Over the last thirty-five years, the United States government has paid out billions of dollars in settlements that have had no fiscal consequences for the agencies whose actions caused the claims. It has done so through the Judgment Fund, a relatively unknown permanent, indefinite appropriation originally created by Congress almost half a century ago to pay certain types of judgments entered against the United States.

Congress struggled for nearly two hundred years to find a way to exercise its Appropriations Clause authority over claims payments that did not drown its members in procedural detail. The article surveys that history. Through …

Nuclear Power, Risk, And Retroactivity, Emily Hammond

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster presented a familiar scenario from a risk perception standpoint. It combined a classic" dread risk" (radioactivity), a punctuating event (the disaster itself), and resultant stigmatization (involving world wide repercussions for nuclear power). Some nuclear nations curtailed nuclear power generation, and decades-old opposition to nuclear power found a renaissance. In these circumstances, risk theory predicts a regulatory knee-jerk response, potentially resulting in inefficient overregulation. But it also suggests procedural palliatives that conveniently overlap with administrative law values, making room for the engagement of the full spectrum of stakeholders. This Article sketches the U.S. regulatory response to …

From Integrity Agency To Accountability Network: The Political Economy Of Public Sector Oversight In Canada, Jamie Baxter

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The federal integrity agencies that are delegated collective responsibility for public sector oversight in Canada face a common challenge to stabilize their ongoing independence from political control. While Parliament has delegated to these agencies key oversight functions that demand some degree of structural independence, they remain vulnerable to shifting political preferences and to an increasingly partisan national politics. This Article uses a political economy framework to theorize the objectives that shape political preferences for agency independence in Canada, and to suggest that structural innovations in the form of 'accountability networks' may provide one strategy to help stabilize those preferences over …

Trade Secret Hacking, Online Data Breaches, And China’S Cyberthreats, Peter K. Yu

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Taking advantage of the forum provided by this timely Symposium, this Article closely examines the ongoing debate on China’s sustained effort in using online hacking and other intrusive techniques to steal trade secrets and proprietary data from U.S. businesses. Part I outlines the five common narratives that have thus far been advanced to recount this widely criticized effort. Sensing the narratives’ negative overtones, Part II offers five modest suggestions on how a more positive debate can be constructed to help identify ways to reduce online hacking and data breaches as well as to enhance the protection of trade secrets and …

A War For Liberty: On The Law Of Conscientious Objection, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

One common understanding of the Second World War is that it was a contest between liberty and tyranny. For many at the time – and for still more today – ‘liberty’ meant the rule of law: government constrained by principle, procedure, and most of all, individual rights. For those states that claimed to represent this rule-of-law tradition, total war presented enormous challenges, even outright contradictions. How would these states manage to square the governmental imperatives of military emergency with the legal protections and procedures essential to preserving the ancient ‘liberty of the subject’? This question could be and was asked …

Unilateral Non-Colonial Secession And The Criteria For Statehood In International Law, Glen Anderson

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The following article examines the interactions between the right of peoples to unilateral non-colonial (“UNC”) secession and the criteria for statehood in international law. In this respect a three-point thesis is developed. First, it is argued that the law of self-determination has resulted in a less strict application of the criteria for statehood based on effectiveness, particularly the effective government criterion. This means that a state created by UNC secession pursuant to the law of self-determination will not have its statehood called into question if lacks an effective government. Second, it is argued that the declaratory approach to recognition is …

Liquidity, Systemic Risk, And The Bankruptcy Treatment Of Financial Contracts, Rizwaan J. Mokal

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

No abstract provided.

Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions about the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the “real” economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American view of the proper relations among state, financial market, and development. This programmatic vision – captured in what we call a “developmental finance state” – is based on three key propositions: (1) that economic and social development is not an “end-state” but a continuing national policy priority; (2) that the modalities of finance are the most potent means of …

Wrinkles In The Administrative Fabric: Regulatory Initiatives And California Economic Development, Steven Ferrey

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article first examines legal issues surrounding California’s decision to enact by regulation and provide a feed-in tariff for certain renewable power less than a decade after the economic collapse of California’s new system of electric sector regulation in 2001. Second, the article also examines legal issues surrounding the ethanol/liquid fuels program implemented as part of California climate change regulation. These two seminal administrative law cases construe the flexibility and limits of state regulation of in-state electricity transactions and out-of-state liquid fuels destined to be sold in the state. Both of these significant California administrative law programs were challenged legally, …

A Pragmatic Approach To Interpreting The Federal Rules, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Bypassing Federalism And The Administrative Law Of Negawatts, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Presidential unilateralism has become a defining feature of the executive branch. But a related and equally important phenomenon has been largely ignored: federal agency efforts to circumvent statutory federalism boundaries. This move, which the Article calls "bypassing federalism, " involves using existing jurisdictional authority to work defacto, rather than dejure, reallocations of power. The Article explores agency bypassing through the lens of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's ("FERC's") promotion of demand response in electricity markets. Demand response refers to customer sales of negative watts, or "negawatts," back to the electrical grid. FERC, eager to promote demand-side management programs but stymied …

The Deliberation Paradox And Administrative Law, Bill Sherman

Faculty Articles

Deliberation is a linchpin of administrative decision-making, and is a key basis for judicial deference to the agency’s interpretation of law. But deliberation has a dual valence in other areas of administrative law: it triggers the right to access to agency information in public meeting laws, but bars access in public records laws. This is the first article to identify and explain what I call the Deliberation Paradox in administrative law. This longstanding but unexplored dichotomy has roots in common law history, separation of powers, the purposes of public access statutes, and assumptions about how the government works. But the …

Agencies, Polarization, And The States, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Political polarization is all the rage. Yet administrative agencies are strikingly absent from leading accounts of contemporary polarization. To the extent they appear, it is largely as acted-upon entities that bear the fallout from the congressional-presidential confrontations that polarization fuels, or as the tools of presidential unilateralism. This failure to incorporate administrative agencies into polarization accounts is a major omission. Agencies possess broad grants of preexisting authority that they can use to reshape governing policy and law, often at presidential instigation, thereby putting pressure on Congress to respond. In the process, they can construct new alliances and arrangements that have …

The Organizational Premises Of Administrative Law, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The core doctrines of administrative law have not taken account of developments in the theory and practice of organization. The contours of these doctrines were set in the mid-twentieth century when the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was passed. Although these doctrines have evolved since then, administration itself has changed more. Many of the widely perceived deficiencies of the doctrines, including some associated with overregulation and others with underregulation, seem influenced by an anachronistic understanding of organization.

Much administrative law continues to understand public administration as bureaucracy. In particular, doctrine is strongly influenced by three premises. First, the backward-looking conception of …

The Environmental Emergency And The Legality Of Discretion In Environmental Law, Jocelyn Stacey

All Faculty Publications

This article argues that environmental issues confront us as an ongoing emergency. The epistemic features of serious environmental issues – the fact that we cannot reliably distinguish ex ante between benign policy choices and choices that may lead to environmental catastrophe – are the same features of an emergency. This means that, like emergencies, environmental issues pose a fundamental challenge for the rule of law: they reveal the necessity of unconstrained executive discretion. Discretion is widely lamented as a fundamental flaw in Canadian environmental law, which undermines both environmental protection and the rule of law itself. Through the conceptual framework …