Agency Commons^™

Operational Responsibility In Ai Governance: A User-Centric Liability Framework, Zhengyang Chen

Faculty Publications

Who bears responsibility when artificial intelligence systems cause harm? This question has become central to AI ethics and governance. Most existing approaches focus on developers, yet this faces serious practical and theoretical problems. Drawing on tort law, agency law, and philosophy of technology, this paper argues that AI should be understood as an instrument whose outputs remain the responsibility of human operators rather than developers. We call this 'user-centric governance.' Placing accountability with deployers promotes public trust by creating clear lines of responsibility, a concern that governance approaches have often overlooked. It preserves democratic accountability by keeping human actors answerable …

Regulatory History And Judicial Review, Todd Phillips, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to simply "incorporate in the rules adopted a concise general statement of their basis and purpose" after they receive comments from the public, and the Supreme Court ruled in Overton Park that courts are to adjudicate whether rules are arbitrary and capricious based on agencies' contemporaneous rationales. Judge-created doctrines incentivize agencies to rely on these "concise" statements to elucidate their rationales, and as a result, rulemaking preambles have ballooned in size as agencies seek to insulate themselves from critical courts.

This article contends that although the APA's statutory requirement is in tension with …

Challenging Agency Deregulation, Todd S. Aagaard

Faculty Publications

The administrative state is experiencing two seismic shifts. First, in recent years, the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions that significantly curtailed the powers of administrative agencies. Second, President Donald Trump is using administrative agencies to aggressively deregulate in his second term. The conventional wisdom is that the Supreme Court’s recent precedent will facilitate the Trump Administration’s deregulatory agenda.

This Article argues the opposite. Instead of promoting agency deregulation, recent Supreme Court precedent restraining agency authority provides a potentially powerful basis for challenging agency deregulation as administrative overreach. Time and time again, the Court has taken agencies to …

Compensating Regulatory Losers, Todd S. Aagaard

Faculty Publications

Every change in government regulation creates benefits and burdens that fall unequally on the population. This unequal distribution raises the question of whether fairness requires compensating those who bear regulatory costs—what is known as the “compensation problem.” The extensive body of scholarship addressing the compensation problem tends to focus only on the burdens of regulatory compliance and ignores the burdens of injuries left unaddressed by regulation. The effect of this differential treatment is to treat past regulatory windfalls as permanent entitlements and to omit from the analysis equally deserving regulatory losers who have suffered the consequences of unregulated harms. This …

The Intersection Of Agency Doctrine And Elder Law: Attorney-In-Fact Authority To Arbitrate Nursing Home Claims, Thomas Simmons

Faculty Publications

With the popularity of durable powers of attorney to manage the estates and personal affairs of individuals with diminished capacity, construction of the scope of powers with which agents are acting is of increasing importance. Some acts should be seen as so inherently personal or so dramatically inconsistent with the expected role of any agent as to be simply outside the scope of agency altogether. Others, such as those involving gifts, self-dealing transactions, or constitutional rights, should be never implied but honored when located within the express terms of an agent's authority. The remaining powers should be construed and mapped …

The Consequences Of Doj Control Of Litigation Authority On Agency Programs, Michael Herz, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Corporate Philanthropy, Executives' Pet Charities And The Agency Problem, Jayne W. Barnard

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Tempest In An Envelope: Reflections On The Bush White House's Failed Takeover Of The U.S. Postal Service, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Issue-Driven Strategy For Review Of Agency Decisions, Charles H. Koch Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.