It’s said that becoming a federal judge can change people—and not always for the better. You become the master of your own kingdom, answerable to no one thanks to the Constitution’s effective guarantee of lifetime tenure. Whatever flaws you had before can become accentuated. It says something remarkable about Stephen F. Williams that his 34 […]
The Trump Administration recently proposed new regulations to define “controlled by a religious organization” for purposes of religious exemption to Title IX. Neither Title IX, passed in 1972, nor the implementing regulations, promulgated in 1975, defined “controlled by a religious organization.” In the ensuing 45 years, the federal administrative agencies charged with enforcing Title IX […]
Welcome back to Ninth Circuit Review-Reviewed, your monthly recap of administrative law before arguably “the second most important court in the land.” This month, we’re going to take a deep dive into a hot-button issue: nationwide preliminary injunctions. Let’s get straight to business. Surveying the Schizophrenic Law of the Circuit on Universal PIs Prior to the Trump-era, august principles of […]
The US border is now officially closed to everyone, unless the crossing falls under the rather ill-defined category of “essential.” This move is officially described as a public health response to the spread of Coronavirus, but it also happens to coincide with the Trump administration’s frequently stated view that the country is “full.” Furthermore, it […]
I was interested to see that a number of law professors filed comments in response to OMB’s request for information on “Reforming Regulatory Enforcement and Adjudication,” which notice you can find here. OMB expressed its concern that agency adjudications in a number of different ways lacked sufficient process, and invited people to weigh in. In […]
by Peter Conti-Brown, Kristina Daugirdas, Daniel E. Ho, Anne Joseph O’Connell, and Nicholas R. Parrillo The field of administrative law has lost one its most important and beloved figures, Judge Stephen F. Williams of the D.C. Circuit, who died on Friday at 83. Since his appointment by President Reagan in 1986, Williams held a reputation […]
In late January 2020, the Trump Administration proposed new regulations to define “controlled by a religious organization” for purposes of religious exemption to Title IX. The proposed regulations eviscerate the common meaning of control and ignore the grammatical structure of the phrase “by a religious organization.” The new definition would expand the scope of religious […]
This week’s Supreme Court decision in Guerrero-Lasprilla v. Barr does more than subject the Board of Immigration Appeals to broader judicial review over the removal of criminal aliens. It offers clues to Thryv v. Click-to-Call Technologies, an important patent law case that is now before the Court—and that was, in fact, argued the same day […]
Introduction In 2011, researchers found significant disparities in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding of minority researchers. In particular, their study determined that—even after controlling for education, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication records, and employers—“[B]lack applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.” This study spurred the […]
The Fed and Treasury are doing absolutely everything they can think up to respond to the coronavirus crisis, and because of the still very flexible Depression era statutory language constraining them doesn’t offer a whole lot of constraint, even after some amendment in Dodd-Frank, it is all just about legal. I want to raise four questions […]
Immigration fuels the engine of corporate America. Fortune 500 corporations routinely recruit talented managers from their offices around the world to work in the United States. Smaller businesses operating in regional markets also rely on immigrant employees, who are willing to fill jobs when the domestic labor market cannot meet demand. Between 25 and 30 percent […]
Deference doctrines such as Chevron and Auer continue to receive criticism from members of the judiciary including members of the Supreme Court. In Kisor, the Supreme Court recently considered whether to overturn Auer and stop deferring to administrative interpretations of their own regulations. Supporters of deference to administrative agencies issued dire warnings that without deference […]
The requirements for notice and comment rulemaking have been well established for decades. When an agency decides that a new rule should be promulgated, an initial version of that rule is published in the Federal Register. The public is then invited to comment on it for a period of time, typically 30 or 60 days. At the end […]
In his forthcoming Hastings Law Journal article, Sticky Regulations and Net Neutrality Restoring Internet Freedom, Aaron Nielson argues, correctly I think, that “[s]tickiness allows regulated parties to invest with greater confidence that they will be able to recoup their investment over the long run – which enhanced investment in turn better allows agencies to pursue […]
The Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable was originally scheduled for this coming June 8-9 at Yale Law School. In light of the uncertainty created by COVID-19, and especially because travel arrangements for the June 8-9 dates would need to be made soon, we as the organizing committee have decided to postpone the event. We are hopeful that […]