Public Administration Commons^™

The Challenge Of Regulatory Excellence, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulation is a high-stakes enterprise marked by tremendous challenges and relentless public pressure. Regulators are expected to protect the public from harms associated with economic activity and technological change without unduly impeding economic growth or efficiency. Regulators today also face new demands, such as adapting to rapidly changing and complex financial instruments, the emergence of the sharing economy, and the potential hazards of synthetic biology and other innovations. Faced with these challenges, regulators need a lodestar for what constitutes high-quality regulation and guidance on how to improve their organizations’ performance. In the book Achieving Regulatory Excellence, leading regulatory experts …

Emergency Medical Services And Public Policy In Durban, Kwazulu-Natal, John Buyske

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This project seeks to explore the realities of the emergency medical system in the Durban area, particularly relative to government policy. It contextualizes its findings within the literature on public policy. Data for the project was collected via nine in-depth interviews with various professionals working in the field of emergency medical services, as well as a survey of fourteen citizens conducted in the peri-urban township of Cato Manor. This data was analyzed using qualitative methods. While every participant had different views and a different perspective on emergency services, some recurring themes and trends became evident, allowing for conclusions to be …

Who Cares How Congress Really Works?, Ryan David Doerfler

All Faculty Scholarship

Legislative intent is a fiction. Courts and scholars accept this by and large. As this Article shows, however, both are confused as to why, and, more importantly, as to what this entails.

This Article argues that the standard account of why legislative intent is a fiction—that Congress is a “they,” not an “it”—rests on an overly simplistic conception of shared agency. Drawing on contemporary work in philosophy of action, this Article contends that Congress as such has no intentions not because of difficulties in aggregating the intentions of individual members, but rather because Congress lacks the sort of delegatory structure …

A Study Of Social Security Disability Litigation In The Federal Courts, Jonah B. Gelbach, David Marcus

All Faculty Scholarship

A person who has sought and failed to obtain disability benefits from the Social Security Administration (“the agency”) can appeal the agency’s decision to a federal district court. In 2015, nearly 20,000 such appeals were filed, comprising a significant part of the federal courts’ civil docket. Even though claims pass through multiple layers of internal agency review, many of them return from the federal courts for even more adjudication. Also, a claimant’s experience in the federal courts differs considerably from district to district around the country. District judges in Brooklyn decide these cases pursuant to one set of procedural rules …

Capturing Regulatory Reality: Stigler’S The Theory Of Economic Regulation, Christopher Carrigan, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a retrospective assessment of economist George Stigler’s classic article, The Theory of Economic Regulation. Stigler argued that regulation is a product that, just like any other product, is produced in a market, and that it can be acquired from the governmental “marketplace” by business firms to serve their private interests and create barriers to entry for potential competitors. He challenged the idea that regulation arises solely to serve the public interest and demonstrated that important political advantages held by businesses can contribute to industry capture of the regulatory process. Although his argument was largely based on …

Administrative Law: The U.S. And Beyond, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Administrative law constrains and directs the behavior of officials in the many governmental bodies responsible for implementing legislation and handling governance responsibilities on a daily basis. This field of law consists of procedures for decision making by these administrative bodies, including rules about transparency and public participation. It also encompasses oversight practices provided by legislatures, courts, and elected executives. The way that administrative law affects the behavior of government officials holds important implications for the fulfillment of democratic principles as well as effective governance in society. This paper highlights salient political theory and legal issues fundamental to the U.S. administrative …

The Bounds Of Executive Discretion In The Regulatory State, Cary Coglianese, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

What are the proper bounds of executive discretion in the regulatory state, especially over administrative decisions not to take enforcement actions? This question, which, just by asking it, would seem to cast into some doubt the seemingly absolute discretion the executive branch has until now been thought to possess, has become the focal point of the latest debate to emerge over the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers. That ever‐growing, heated debate is what motivated more than two dozen distinguished scholars to gather for a two‐day conference held late last year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a conference organized …

Extending The Fundamental Right Of Marriage To Same-Sex Couples: The United States Supreme Court Decision In Obergefell V. Hodges, Donald Hermann

College of Law Faculty

No abstract provided.

Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

All Faculty Scholarship

Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …

A No-Tribunal Sdrm And The Means Of Binding Creditors To The Terms Of A Restructuring Plan, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

The paper addresses two discrete but related and essential attributes of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM). It first considers the merits and feasibility of an SDRM that would provide a procedure for proposing and adopting a restructuring plan for a sovereign debtor’s debt which would not involve any tribunal or administrator (a No-Tribunal SDRM). The No-Tribunal SDRM would undertake the restructuring as if the sovereign debtor and its creditors were subject to the Model CAC regime. In addition to embodying a novel and interesting structure for an SDRM—and one that eliminates the difficult hurdle of identifying a satisfactory tribunal—adoption …

Optimizing Government For An Optimizing Economy, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Much entrepreneurial growth in the United States today emanates from technological advances that optimize through contextualization. Innovations as varied as Airbnb and Uber, fintech firms and precision medicine, are transforming major sectors in the economy by customizing goods and services as well as refining matches between available resources and interested buyers. The technological advances that make up the optimizing economy create new challenges for government oversight of the economy. Traditionally, government has overseen economic activity through general regulations that aim to treat all individuals equally; however, in the optimizing economy, business is moving in the direction of greater individualization, not …

The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Nonenforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters

All Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …

Governmental Intervention In An Economic Crisis, Robert K. Rasmussen, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper articulates a framework both for assessing the various government bailouts that took place at the onset of Great Recession and for guiding future rescue efforts when they become necessary. The goals for those engineering a bailout should be to be as transparent as possible, to articulate clearly the reason for the intervention, to respect existing priorities among investors, to exercise control only at the top level where such efforts can be seen by the public, and to exit as soon as possible. By these metrics, some of the recent bailouts should be applauded, while others fell short. We …

Motivating Without Mandates: The Role Of Voluntary Programs In Environmental Governance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

All Faculty Scholarship

For the last several decades, governments around the world have tried to use so-called voluntary programs to motivate private firms to act proactively to protect the environment. Unlike conventional environmental regulation, voluntary programs offer businesses flexibility to adopt cost-effective measures to reduce environmental impacts. Rather than prodding firms to act through threats of enforcement, they aim to entice firms to move forward by offering various kinds of positive incentives, ranging from public recognition to limited forms of regulatory relief. Despite the theoretical appeal of voluntary programs, their proper role in government’s environmental toolkit depends on the empirical evidence of how …

The Subterranean Counterrevolution: The Supreme Court, The Media, And Litigation Retrenchment, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is part of a larger project to study the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we show how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for private enforcement. An institutional perspective helps to explain the outcome we document: the long-term erosion of the infrastructure of private enforcement as a result of …

Ua12/8 Annual Campus Safety & Security Report, Wku Police

WKU Archives Records

A statement of current campus policies regarding procedures for students and others to report criminal actions or other emergencies occurring on campus and policies concerning the institution's response to such reports.