Summary: This post explores and assesses Justice Kavanaugh’s challenge to the veterans benefit canon of statutory construction, and similar substantive interpretive canons regarding entitlements or benefits legislation. In the midst of the major decisions the Supreme Court handed down last term, it was easy to miss Rudisil v. McDonough, 601 U.S. 294 (2024), especially a […]
As we enter the second half of June, all eyes may be trained on the Supreme Court, but work at the D.C. Circuit continues apace. The Court issued three administrative-law decisions last week. The acronyms are mostly the usual fare—FERC, NLRB, and FOIA—but here’s one you do not see every day: MEAN. Plus, an opinion […]
During the week of June 2, the D.C. Circuit issued two administrative-law opinions and one interesting denial of a motion for an emergency stay. In Secretary of Labor v. Industrial TurnAround Corporation, the court dismissed a petition from the Secretary of Labor for lack of jurisdiction. In August 2022, three miners were injured when a […]
Like many Americans, I’m deeply alarmed by the escalating attacks on consumer protection in Washington – especially the efforts to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Weakening this vital agency will lead to more fraud, more predatory lending, and greater risk of another economic crisis. I’m also deeply troubled by recent developments at the Federal […]
Among the 161 Executive Orders that President Trump has issued during his second term through June 12, 2025, at least nine relate to federal regulation. These are identified in paragraph 6 below. (The designation “at least nine” is to recognize that the definitional boundaries of which executive orders relate to federal regulation are somewhat subjective […]
With the legality and wisdom of “nationwide” injunctions at issue in the courts and Congress, it is time for the states to view the problem through the lens of federalism. Using this lens, the states should oppose all use of nationwide injunctions and support their limitation by the Supreme Court and Congress because the exercise of such […]
We have begun the development of panels for the 2025 ABA Administrative Law Conference, which will be held virtually again on November 20-21, 2025. This is a great way to share your research and expertise with around 1,000 regulatory lawyers and scholars. We expect to have twenty panels on various topics. In particular, we would like […]
Section 706(2) of the APA provides, in deceptively simple language, that a “reviewing court shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions . . . not in accordance with law.” In the ongoing debate over the scope of relief under the APA, much depends on the “semantic content of the phrase ‘set aside.’” In a recent working […]
The Supreme Court’s stay order in Trump v. Wilcox confirms that the Court is poised to rethink the precedents that govern the removal of federal officers. If so, the Court should rethink a central premise from scratch. In the Wilcox stay order, the Supreme Court treated the validity of removal protections as a binary question: […]
Pacific Legal Foundation and the Catholic University Law Review seek papers for a symposium on “Searching for Constitutional Limits on Environmental & Natural Resources Law,” to be held in spring 2026 at the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. The full call for papers is available here. We seek papers […]
As most will recall, the Supreme Court has spent the last several years reinventing statutory interpretation in agency cases. That project has now been pithily summarized in the recent opinion in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County: “As a general matter, when an agency interprets a statute, judicial review of the agency’s interpretation is […]
There have been quite a few really terrific new administrative law papers posted to SSRN over the last few months, adding to my summer reading list. My SSRN reading list posts capture some of them, but my colleague Dan Deacon also features some in more depth each month as part of his Ad Law Reading […]
Today’s Ad Law Reading Room entry is “Designing Policymaking Mechanisms for Regulatory Dynamism,” by Julie E. Cohen, Nina-Simone Edwards, Meg Leta Jones, and Paul Ohm. Here is the abstract: The administrative state is struggling to counter the harms of today’s information economy. Existing mechanisms for policymaking fall short both substantively and procedurally. Substantively, regulators face […]
Has the Supreme Court closed one avenue of constitutional arguments against the structure of the Federal Reserve only to open up another? By labeling the Fed a “quasi-private” entity, parties aggrieved by the Federal Reserve’s actions may challenge them as violations of the private nondelegation doctrine. On May 22, the Court made major waves in […]
The telecom community’s ears recently perked up when the Wall Street Journal reported that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr sent a letter to Charlie Ergen, Chairman of the Board of EchoStar Corporation, threatening to revoke a significant portion of the company’s spectrum licenses. According to Carr, EchoStar is “warehousing” spectrum by failing to […]