Administrative Law Commons^™

Tinkering With The Machinery Of Life, Ben L. Trachtenberg

Faculty Publications

Recent adjustments by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to their cost–benefit analysis procedures could cause tremendous changes to federal regulation. For decades, federal agencies have calculated the value of a statistical life (VSL) and have used that number when evaluating the costs and benefits of proposed regulations. If a regulation was expected to save lives, the number of lives saved could be multiplied by the VSL to monetize the benefits. Because, however, lives saved in the future were given the same nominal value as lives saved in the present, the real value of future …

Exhausted, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) contains an administrative exhaustion provision that was interpreted by the Supreme Court in Woodford v. Ngo in 2006 to impose a procedural default component. This piece argues that we should take seriously Justice Breyer’s Woodford concurrence, in which he noted that administrative law doctrine contains well-established exceptions to exhaustion. Although this point might at first seem inconsistent with other Supreme Court cases interpreting the PLRA, this Article argues that Justice Breyer’s concurrence can be reconciled with those opinions. PLRA exhaustion invokes regular administrative law exhaustion doctrine so long as it is not inconsistent with …

Providing Another Leg To Stand On - A Question Of The Zone Of Interests In Challenging Agency Decision-Making Under The Air Pollution Control Act, Bill Welkowitz

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Ending Silence: Youth Speaking Up About Sexual Abuse In Custody - Charlie’S Report, Brenda V. Smith, Stephanie A. Kinard, Jaime M. Yarussi, Michael J. Auger

Research Reports & White Papers

focusing on male youth age 10-13

Copyright Policymaking As Procedural Democratic Process: A Discourse-Theoretic Perspective On Acta, Sopa, And Pipa, Annemarie Bridy

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Capture Nuances In The Contest For Financial Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Applying capture analysis in the hotly contested arena of financial regulation is difficult. Numerous regulators with widely differing missions and widely diverse stakeholders are involved. Regulators operate under widely differing authorizing legislation. They even function at different levels of government. Agencies are often at odds with each other when it comes to determining optimal public policy. Unlike policy disputes in many other areas of regulation, which can be settled by reference to scientific data, public policy in financial regulation rests profoundly on essentially contested economic ideologies. This makes financial policy doubly difficult: one the one hand, it requires deep expertise—and …

Of Dialogue--And Democracy--In Administrative Law, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Linda Cohen and Matthew Spitzer's study, "The Government Litigant Advantage," sheds important light on how the Solicitor General's litigation behavior may impact the Supreme Court's decision making agenda and outcomes for regulatory and administrative law cases. By emphasizing how the Solicitor General affects cases that the Supreme Court decides, Cohen and Spitzer's findings confirm that administrative law's emphasis on lower appellate court decisions is not misplaced. Some say that D.C. Circuit cases carry equal-if not more-precedential weight than Supreme Court decisions in resolving administrative law issues. Cohen and Spitzer use positive political theory to provide a novel explanation for some …

Genealogies Of Risk: Searching For Safety, 1930s-1970s, William Boyd

Publications

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s--a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of …

Promising To Be Prudent: A Private Law Approach To Mortgage Loan Regulation In Common-Interest Communities, Julia Patterson Forrester Rogers, Jerome Organ

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article explores one possible private law prescription that may help common-interest communities avoid the financial disaster associated with foreclosure epidemics-a financing restriction that would limit (1) the ability of any homeowner in a common-interest community to borrow excessively against the value of her home, and (2) the ability of lenders to make loans that a homeowner does not have the ability to repay. Part I of this Article begins in the Great Depression with a discussion of Neponsit Property Owners' Association v. Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, w exploring how the case both fostered the development of common-interest communities and …

A Pragmatic Republic, If You Can Keep It, Bill Sherman

Faculty Articles

The administrative state has been bedeviled by doubts about its democratic legitimacy and its questionable Constitutional provenance. Courts and scholars attack or shore up this weakness, but almost all proceed on the assumption that the administrative state is a modern leviathan unimaginable to the Founders. Consequently, questions about the role of politics in agency decisions assign a disfavored role to “pure politics” in rulemaking. This Book Review Essay challenges that assumption and its implications for the role of politics in administrative decisionmaking. Centering on a review of Jerry L. Mashaw’s new book, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred …

Bring In The Nerds: Secrecy, National Security, And The Creation Of International Intellectual Property Law, David S. Levine

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The negotiations of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement have been conducted largely in secret, elevating intellectual property piracy to the level of national security concerns for purposes of accessing information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, the level of actual secrecy has been tiered, with corporate interests enjoying far more access to negotiation information than the general public. At the same time, similar intellectual property issues were negotiated in the relative transparency of Congress' debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, allowing for much greater public involvement. With national …

Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit: Bureaucratic Politics In Federal Workplace Agencies Serving Undocumented Workers, Ming H. Chen

Publications

This Article integrates social science theory about immigrant incorporation and administrative agencies with empirical data about immigrant-serving federal workplace agencies to illuminate the role of bureaucracies in the construction of rights. More specifically, it contends that immigrants' rights can be protected when workplace agencies incorporate immigrants into labor law enforcement in accordance with the agencies' professional ethos and organizational mandates. Building on Miles' Law that "where you stand depends on where you sit," this Article argues that agencies exercise discretion in the face of contested law and in contravention to a political climate hostile to undocumented immigrants for the purpose …

A Meteorite And A Lost City: Mutually Beneficial Solutions Through Alternative Dispute Resolution, Sam Markowitz

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Note proceeds in a number of parts. Part I will present two case studies: First, the Willamette Meteorite and the agreement between the Grand Ronde Tribe and the AMNH; and second, the recent agreement between Peru and Yale University regarding artifacts from Machu Picchu. Part II will briefly explain and outline Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and the methods through which successful resolution to disputes are achieved, specifically noting that in the last decade, cultural property disputes have been increasingly resolved through ADR. Part III will compare the agreements reached in both instances, proposing several reasons why these agreements worked …

Embracing Administrative Common Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

This Foreword begins with the descriptive claim that much of administrative law is really administrative common law: doctrines and requirements that are largely judicially created, as opposed to those specified by Congress, the President, or individual agencies. Although governing statutes exert some constraining force on judicial creativity, the primary basis of these judge-fashioned doctrines lies in judicial conceptions of appropriate institutional roles, along with pragmatic and normative concerns, that are frequently constitutionally infused and developed incrementally through precedent. Yet the judicially created character of administrative law is rarely acknowledged and often condemned by courts.

Turning from descriptive to more normative, …

Beyond The Private Attorney General: Equality Directives In American Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

American civil rights regulation is generally understood as relying on private enforcement in courts rather than imposing positive duties on state actors to further equity goals. This Article argues that this dominant conception of American civil rights regulation is incomplete. American civil rights regulation also contains a set of "equality directives," whose emergence and reach in recent years have gone unrecognized in the commentary. These federal-level equality directives use administrative tools of conditioned spending, policymaking, and oversight powerfully to promote substantive inclusion with regard to race, ethnicity, language, and disability. These directives move beyond the constraints of the standard private …

Justice Stevens And The Chevron Puzzle, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Stevens's most famous decision – Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC – has come to stand for an institutional choice approach to agency interpretation. But there is no evidence that Justice Stevens shared this understanding. Instead, he followed an equilibrium-preserving approach, which sought to nudge agencies to reconsider decisions the Justice regarded as unreasonable. Although the equilibrium-preserving approach is consistent with what a common law judge would embrace, the institutional choice perspective is probably more consistent with the needs of the modem administrative state, and it appears the Court as a whole is gradually adopting that perspective.

"Deference" Is Too Confusing – Let's Call Them "Chevron Space" And "Skidmore Weight", Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests an underappreciated, appropriate, and conceptually coherent structure to the Chevron relationship of courts to agencies, grounded in the concept of "allocation." Because the term "deference" muddles rather than clarifies the structure's operation, this Essay avoids speaking of "Chevron deference" and "Skidmore deference." Rather, it argues, one could more profitably think in terms of "Chevron space" and "Skidmore weight." "Chevron space" denotes the area within which an administrative agency has been statutorily empowered to act in a manner that creates legal obligations or constraints – that is, its allocated authority. "Skidmore weight" …

The Chevron Two-Step In Georgia's Administrative Law, David Shipley

Scholarly Works

The Georgia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals have long accepted the General Assembly’s authority to enact legislation that establishes administrative agencies and empowers those agencies to promulgate rules and regulations to implement their enabling statutes. In addition, the Georgia Constitution provides that the General Assembly may authorize agencies to exercise quasi-judicial powers. Administrative agencies with broad powers enjoy a secure position under Georgia law.

Like federal and state administrative agencies throughout the nation, Georgia’s many boards, commissions and authorities make policy when they apply their governing statutes in promulgating regulations of general applicability, and in ruling on specific matters …

Unols Vessels And U.S. Exports Regulations: Seeking A Coherent Solution, Sea Grant Law Fellows

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

When Agencies Go Nuclear: A Game Theoretic Approach To The Biggest Sticks In An Agency's Arsenal, Brigham Daniels

Faculty Scholarship

A regulatory agency’s arsenal often contains multiple weapons. Occasionally, however, an agency has the power to completely obliterate its regulatory targets or to make major waves in society by using a “regulatory nuke.” A regulatory nuke is a tool with two primary characteristics. First, it packs power sufficient to profoundly impact individual regulatory targets or significantly affect important aspects of society or the economy. Second, from the perspective of the regulatory agency, it is politically unavailable in all but the most extreme situations. They are found in many corners of the federal bureaucracy. This Article illustrates that even when individual …