The scope of federal environmental reviews is at stake when the Supreme Court decides the just-argued case Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), agencies must analyze the environmental impacts of actions they fund, authorize, or carry out. Those impacts may include both direct impacts from a project as […]

Over the past several years, the conservative legal movement and corporate interests have enjoyed one administrative law victory after another. Admirers of the administrative state have watched in general dismay as regulators’ ability to protect the public health, the environment, and worker safety and organizing rights has dwindled. Despite their chagrin over these developments, progressives […]

I’ve got a new piece in the Atlantic about the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and Ramaswamy’s claims depend much more on the finer points of administrative law than I would’ve expected! I thought about mental models when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy released an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making their first major statement about the […]

As Chris Walker has explained, he and Mike Kagan recently filed this amicus brief urging the Ninth Circuit to rehear en banc a case that involves a question of exceptional importance: how to reconcile Skidmore “respect” for an agency’s interpretation with the central holding of Loper Bright. The amicus brief argues that, in “the guise of giving Skidmore ‘respect’ to a precedential statutory-interpretation decision […]

In August 2023, the Fifth Circuit ruled in Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not have the legal authority to issue licenses for private companies to store spent nuclear fuel at locations away from reactors. The court’s decision rests in part on a cursory and strained application of the major questions […]

It’s the last day of November, and I’m just barely getting this getting the October post up here. It’s been a busy semester, though much to be grateful for. Here is the October 2024 Edition of the most-downloaded recent papers (those announced in the last 60 days) from SSRN’s U.S. Administrative Law eJournal, which is edited by Bill […]

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 tackle Nebraska v. Su, in which a split three-judge panel sided with the challengers against President Biden’s $15 minimum wage mandate for federal contractors. Besides engendering a direct circuit split, […]

As I mentioned in my preliminary take on the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court overruled Chevron deference but seemed to preserve some sort of Skidmore “weight” or “respect” while carefully refusing to call it judicial “deference.” As I noted in that post, “[i]t will be fascinating to see how […]

The Pacific Legal Foundation (where I work) has issued a call for papers for its upcoming research roundtable on “Rulemaking by Adjudication.” The deadline for proposal submissions is January 10th. Here is an excerpt from the description (full version available at the PLF website):

We appreciate receiving attention, even if critical, from one of America’s most powerful conservative organizations. Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a libertarian and fiscally conservative advocacy group, has been widely recognized as one of the most influential conservative organizations in American politics. While we appreciate the attention Kevin Schmidt and Thomas Kimbrell of AFP have given […]

What if instead of unlawfully abusing emergency powers for bad things, presidents unlawfully abused them for “good” things? That’s the argument Berkeley Law Professors Elena Chachko and Katerina Linos make in their paper “Emergency Powers for Good,” published in the William & Mary Law Review. They reiterate that emergency powers are often abused by democracies and […]