My posts are designed to help you keep track of the D.C. Circuit — with particular focus on administrative law — in five minutes a week. To that end, for nearly five years I’ve provided a summary of the week’s cases.* But this week I’ve really gone above and beyond the call of duty. I’ve […]
By the time he actually signed it, President Trump’s “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” was no surprise. His complaints about social media platforms, and his calls for Congress to rescind Internet platform companies’ immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, are long-familiar refrains. More recently, he practically shouted his intentions to take […]
I was pleased to be invited to write the Foreword for the Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of the Duke Law Journal’s annual Administrative Law Symposium. Congratulations to the DLJ are certainly in order for initiating and sustaining this annual volume which long has been one of the most prestigious – if not the most prestigious – […]
My April SSRN post is barely making it online before the end of May, as the last couple months have been both a blur and a trudge. (Among other things, I’ve discovered I am a very poor elementary school teacher as we’ve struggled with distance-learning/teaching our kids at home.) But there is a lot of […]
This week the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the D.C. Circuit; that doesn’t happen very often. And yesterday there was a (puzzling) brouhaha about a procedural order. Even so, on the whole, it has been a quiet week for the D.C. Circuit.* So I’ll claim a moment of personal privilege. This morning Jerry Sloan passed away. […]
Each day of the COVID crisis we see unprecedented administrative action to respond to the pandemic. At the same time, litigants continue to ask courts to consider whether administrative agencies have exceeded their authority, sometimes relying on claims of deficient process. One such case is Altera v. Commissioner, in which the taxpayer filed a cert petition that asks […]
Yesterday the White House issued a new executive order titled “Executive Order on Regulatory Relief to Support Economic Recovery.” It is intended, most immediately and obviously, to amplify the economic recovery so sorely needed amid the Covid-19 crisis. But President Trump’s order could have significant long-term effects, because it contains what we can think of […]
We’ve covered the issue of Congressional Review Act (CRA) disapprovals quite closely here on the blog, so readers might recall that Congress can use the CRA to disapprove federal agency rules using fast-track procedures during a special window of time following the rule’s issuance. What we’ve surely never talked about on the blog is how […]
This post discusses the media plaintiffs’ prospect in WP Co. LLC v. U.S. Small Business Administration, seeking information about government disbursement of funds under two programs being used to address the severe economic dislocations attendant the coronavirus pandemic. “In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus “Not Now!:” FOIA Requests and the Small Business Administration’s […]
On May 12, 2020, the Supreme Court heard argument in the consolidated cases of Trump v. Mazars LLP and Trump v. Deutsche Bank,[1] which concern whether standing committees of Congress have constitutional and statutory authority to enforce subpoenas against private corporations in order to obtain non-government records belonging to the President. From the perspectives of the congressional plaintiffs and the […]
In a tag-on measure to highly anticipated and deeply controversial new regulations regarding how educational institutions must respond to sexual harassment and assault under Title IX, the Department of Education (DOE) included what it terms a clarification of the rules regarding religious exemption to Title IX. Specifically, the tag-on measure modifies 34 CFR § 106.12(b) to state that an educational institution controlled by […]
About a year ago I wrote a post entitled Precedential Musings; a few months later I wrote a post entitled A Question Answered.* This week, the D.C. Circuit returned to the issue. In Qassim v. Trump, Judge Millett, joined by Judges Pillard and Edwards, concluded that D.C. Circuit precedent (most notably, Kiyemba v. Obama) merely holds that […]
A few weeks ago, the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State announced its 2020–2021 agenda for research roundtables. Today we are calling for papers for the first two Autumn 2020 roundtables, both related to the Covid-19 outbreak: [T]he Gray Center’s first two research roundtables will focus on lessons learned from […]
The Program on Data and Governance at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (my home institution) has a fascinating and timely webinar scheduled for next Thursday, 5/21, at noon, and on the privacy implications of using smartphones as tools to fight a pandemic. You can register for free here. And here are the […]
I have just uploaded to SSRN a draft of a forthcoming article I have coauthored with Kristen M. Renberg entitled The Paradoxical Impact of Scalia’s Campaign Against Legislative History. As many readers of this blog will know, in the mid-1980s Judge and then Justice Scalia advocated forcefully against the use of legislative history in statutory […]