Part 1 My name is Brian Lewis and I am Legislative Counsel with the Uniform Law Commission (ULC). The ULC is a nonprofit entity, formed in 1892, to create nonpartisan state legislation. Commissioners—who are all lawyers—are appointed for a term of service by the individual state governments, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the […]
When the Department of Homeland Security makes the choice to refrain from bringing charges against an undocumented person working at a restaurant or to freeze a removal order for a woman who serves as a primary caregiver to her U.S.-citizen children, the agency is favorably exercising “prosecutorial discretion,” which refers to the decision by DHS […]
There is substantial evidence that opioid addiction poses a significant threat to individual and public health in the United States. The CDC reports that the majority of drug overdose deaths (more than six out of ten) involve an opioid. Since 1999, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids quadrupled. From 2000 to 2015 more than […]
Samuel L. Bray’s forthcoming Harvard Law Review article, Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction, argues that federal courts should eschew issuing nation-wide injunctions, no matter the importance of the question litigated or the value of nation-wide uniformity. He urges adherence to the principle that injunctions against the federal government should be “plaintiff-protective,” providing relief only to […]
Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Trump, recently changed her position in the White House from informal advisor to unpaid government employee. See CNN (Mar. 29, 2017). Through this change, Ivanka, referred to here by her first name to avoid confusion with her father, became officially subject to various statutory ethics rules. Though the relevant […]
Political control of administrative agencies is a hot topic these days. And Brian D. Feinstein has a timely new article, Congress in the Administrative State, forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review that empirically evaluates how Congressional oversight hearings fit into the picture. Using an original dataset constructed from inspectors general semiannual reports, Government Accountability Office annual “top management challenges” lists, […]
Apologies — this will have to be a quick post. I’m traveling.* On Friday, April 21, the D.C. Circuit issued two opinions about the power of knowledge. The government lost both cases — one in which it sought information and the other in which someone else sought information from it. In CFPB v. Accrediting Council […]
Back in January, a group of constitutional law scholars (working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)) sued President Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause. In a previous post, I explained argued that those scholars did not have Article III standing because they had not alleged a cognizable injury in fact. Today, the […]
Election losses bring calls for blame, and FBI Director James Comey has led the early returns. Critics continue to charge that the FBI committed errors in its investigation of Hillary Clinton and that those errors contributed to her defeat. The FBI, they argue, outran its legal writ, particularly in its summer release of its recommendation […]
In case you missed it, Profesor Neomi Rao has been nominated to serve as the next Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In the world of “admin law,” there are few positions more important than OIRA Administrator. Cass Sunstein, a former OIRA Administrator, has explained at length why the position […]
We published a number of blog posts on the Gorsuch Supreme Court confirmation hearing — at least with respect to Judge Gorsuch’s administrative law and separation of powers jurisprudence. In light of that coverage, I thought readers may be interested in a terrific series by Larry Solum, who testified at the confirmation hearing, entitled “The […]
Who among us does not occasionally enjoy a forgotten nineteenth-century Supreme Court decision adopting a super-powerful form of deference that leaves our dear friend Chevron in the dust?[1] And surely there is no time better than the present for such reflections now that Justice Gorsuch has transformed judicial deference to agency statutory constructions into such […]
This post was co-authored with Rachel Sachs, a professor at Washington University School of Law. It has been cross-posted at Take Care, a blog concerned with President Trump’s constitutional duty to take care to faithfully execute the law. Yesterday, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump admitted that he’s toying with the idea […]
Over at National Review, Yuval Levin argues that a Republican consensus over repeal and replace might slowly be emerging: It now seems that the familiar debates about tax credits vs. deductions and even about spending levels aren’t exactly where the dividing lines are in the House conference. Rather, … the Freedom Caucus Republicans want to […]
I’m pleased to announce that my latest article, Sticky Regulations, has been posted to SSRN. It will be published next year in The University of Chicago Law Review. If you are interested, I’m going to present it on April 21st at the Rethinking Due Process Public Policy Conference hosted by the Center for the Study […]