Agency Commons^™

Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …

Chipping Away At The Rock: Perez V. Mortgage Bankers Association And The Seminole Rock Deference Doctrine, Kevin O. Leske

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Largely escaping judicial and scholarly examination for close to seventy years, the Seminole Rock deference doctrine directs federal courts to defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of its own regulation unless such interpretation “is plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” But at long last the United States Supreme Court is poised to re-evaluate the doctrine.

In March 2015, in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association, the Court addressed whether a federal agency was required to follow the notice-and-comment procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act after it changed a prior interpretation of its regulation under the “Paralyzed Veterans doctrine.” Although …

Personal Injury Victims As Insurance Collection Agents: Erisa Preemption Of State Antisubrogation Laws, Jonathan P. Connery

Journal of Law and Policy

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) was enacted in 1974 to protect the pension rights of employees nationwide. However, due to its broad preemptive powers, ERISA has since developed into a tool used by health insurers to recover millions of dollars in tort damages meant to benefit employees with ERISA health plans. This practice, known as subrogation, has been met with legislative backlash in the form of state antisubrogation statutes, which attempt to limit the enforceability of subrogation clauses found in almost all ERISA health plans. However, many courts have held that ERISA preempts these antisubrogation statutes, thereby affirming …

Accessory Disloyalty: Comparative Perspectives On Substantial Assistance To Fiduciary Breach, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

Culpable participation in a fiduciary's breach of duty is independently wrongful. Much about this contingent form of liability is open to dispute. In the United States, well-established general doctrine defines the elements requisite to establishing accessory liability, which is categorized as a tort and often referred to as "aiding-and abetting" liability. What's controversial is how the tort applies to particular categories of actors, most recently investment banks that advise boards of target companies in M&A transactions. In the United Kingdom, in contrast, accessory liability in connection with a breach of trust or fiduciary duty is controversial because the law is …

Culpable Participation In Fiduciary Breach, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This essay makes a case for the salience of tort law to fiduciary law, focusing on actors who culpably participate in a fiduciary's breach of duty, whether by inducing the breach or lending substantial assistance to it. Although the elements of this accessory tort are relatively settled in the United States, how the tort applies to particular categories of actors-most recently investment bankers who serve as M&A advisors-provokes controversy. The paper also explores the less developed terrain of primary actors who breach governance duties that are not fiduciary obligations because the entity's organizational documents eliminate fiduciary duties, as Delaware law …

Fiduciary Breach, Once Removed, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defining Agency And Its Scope (Ii), Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary law necessarily raises issues of delineation and demarcation, which this paper demonstrates through examples involving common-law agents. Serving as an agent, and thus as a fiduciary, does not necessarily mean that agency law prescribes all duties that the agent owes the principal. The agent may have rights external to the relationship that the agent may exercise, distinct from the duty of loyalty owed the principal. When an agent acts outside the bounds of an agency relationship, the principal’s consent is not requisite to conduct that would constitute disloyalty within the bounds of the agency relationship. The paper illustrates the …

Bureaucratic Administration: Experimentation And Immigration Law, Joseph Landau

Faculty Scholarship

In debates about executive branch authority and policy innovation, scholars have focused on two overarching relationships—horizontal tension between the president and Congress and the vertical interplay of federal and state authority. However, these debates have overlooked the role of frontline bureaucratic officials in advancing the laws they administer. This Article looks to immigration law—in which lower-level federal officers exercise discretion delegated down throughout federal agencies—to identify how bottom-up agency influences can inform categorical, across-the-board executive branch policy. In this Article, I argue that decisions by frontline officers can and should be better harnessed to pair local laboratories of executive experimentation …

Pit River Tribe V. Bureau Of Land Management, 793 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2015), Kathryn S. Ore

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Pit River Tribe v. Bureau of Land Management, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explained the correct application of the zone of interests test and further solidified the importance of proper NEPA and NHPA analysis in geothermal leasing. The court reaffirmed that the BLM and the Forest Service must conduct additional cultural and environmental analysis when granting lease extensions under the Geothermal Steam Act. Furthermore, it rejected the BLM’s decision to grant forty-year lease continuations to unproven geothermal leases by treating them as a unit rather than individually.

Interagency Conflict: A Model For Analysis, Betsy C. Cox, Gary Shmerling

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

High Country Conservation Advocates V. United States Forest Service, 52 F. Supp. 3d 1174 (D. Colo. 2014), Kathryn S. Ore

Public Land & Resources Law Review

High Country Conservation Advocates v. United States Forest Service concerns the United States Forest Service’s and the Bureau of Land Management’s authorizations of on-the-ground mining exploration activities in the Sunset Roadless Area of western Colorado. The United States District Court for the District of Colorado’s holding has far-reaching consequences for federal agencies’ analysis and disclosure of impacts on the climate under the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”). In addition to bolstering the Plaintiffs’ recent successes at establishing legal standing to challenge federal agencies’ disclosures and analyses of impacts on the climate under NEPA, High Country is the first case to …

Purposivism In The Executive Branch: How Agencies Interpret Statutes, Kevin M. Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

After decades of debate, the lines of distinction between textualism and purposivism have been carefully drawn with respect to the judicial task of statutory interpretation. Far less attention has been devoted to the question of how executive branch officials approach statutory interpretation. While scholars have contrasted agencies interpretive practices from those of courts, they have not yet developed a theory of agency statutory interpretation. This Article develops a purposivist theory of agency statutory interpretation on the ground that regulatory statutes oblige agencies to implement the statutes they administer in that manner. Regulatory statutes not only grant powers but also impose …

The Bayh–Dole Act & Public Rights In Federally Funded Inventions: Will The Agencies Ever Go Marching In?, Ryan Whalen

Northwestern University Law Review

For over thirty years, the Bayh–Dole Act has granted federal agencies the power to force the recipients of federal research funding to license the resulting inventions to third parties. Despite having this expansive power, no federal agency has ever seen fit to utilize it. This Note explores why Bayh–Dole march-in rights have never been used, and proposes reforms that would help ensure that, in the instances when they are most required, the public is able to access the inventions it bankrolled.

There have been five documented march-in petitions since the Bayh–Dole Act was passed into law. Each petition was dismissed …

Kicking Employers While They Are Down: Vicarious Liability Under The Anti-Kickback Act, Daniel Horner

Catholic University Law Review

The Anti-Kickback Act is one of the instruments the Government uses to punish and prevent procurement fraud. The Act creates criminal and civil liability for the use of kickbacks by government contractors. Specifically, the civil provision contains two subsections -- one punishing employees for their actions, and the other punishing employers under a theory of strict liability. In United States ex rel. Vavra v. Kellogg, Brown & Root, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that employers are subject to vicarious liability for their employees' violations of the first subsection of the civil suit provision …

Judicial Review Of Agency Benefit-Cost Analysis, W. Kip Viscusi, Caroline Cecot

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article evaluates judicial review of agency benefit-cost analysis ("BCA") by examining a substantial sample of thirty-eight judicial decisions on agency actions that implicate BCA. Essentially, the Administrative Procedure Act tasks federal courts with ensuring that federal agency action is reasonable. As more agencies use BCA to justify their rulemakings, the court's duty often requires judges to evaluate the reasonableness of agency BCAs. In this Article, we discuss the challenges that trigger judicial review of agency BCAs and the standards that govern the review. We then present specific examples of how courts analyze BCAs. Overall, we find many examples of …

The Interpretive Dimension Of Seminole Rock, Kevin M. Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A lively debate has emerged over the deferential standard of review courts apply when reviewing an agency's interpretation of its own regulations. That standard, traditionally associated with Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co. and now more frequently attributed to Auer v. Robbins, states that a court must accept an agency's interpretation of its own regulations unless the interpretation is "plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation." This Article argues that a court's choice of method for interpreting regulations” including how it determines which agency interpretations are inconsistent with the regulation ” may be just as important, if not more …

Agency Rulemaking And Political Transitions, Anne Joseph O'Connell

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Fda For Financial Innovation: Applying The Insurable Interest Doctrine To Twenty-First-Century Financial Markets, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Northwestern University Law Review

The financial crisis of 2008 was caused in part by speculative investment in complex derivatives. In enacting the Dodd–Frank Act, Congress sought to address the problem of speculative investment, but it merely transferred that authority to various agencies, which have not yet found a solution. We propose that when firms invent new financial products, they be forbidden to sell them until they receive approval from a government agency designed along the lines of the FDA, which screens pharmaceutical innovations. The agency would approve financial products if they satisfy a test for social utility that focuses on whether the product will …

Work Made For Hire – Analyzing The Multifactor Balancing Test, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Authorship, and hence, initial ownership of copyrighted works is oftentimes controlled by the 1976 Copyright Act’s work made for hire doctrine. This doctrine states that works created by employees within the scope of their employment result in the employer owning the copyright. One key determination in this analysis is whether the hired party is an employee or independent contractor. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court, in CCNV v. Reid, answered the question of how employees are distinguished from independent contractors by setting forth a list of factors courts should consider. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not give further guidance on …

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 …