A bipartisan group in the Senate is working on a large package to reform the rulemaking process. Negotiations are ongoing but the New York Times reported last week that the package is likely to require agencies to engage in additional cost-benefit analysis that would be subject to judicial review. In joint work, I have argued […]
I’ve got a new essay coming out as part of a symposium on executive power at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here’s the intro: Accusations of illegality have dogged the Obama administration’s efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act, the most ambitious piece of social legislation since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid. Some […]
In many respects, the Supreme Court’s cert grant earlier this week in United States v. Texas was utterly unsurprising. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a nationwide injunction blocking a Department of Homeland Security policy that would have allowed approximately 4 million parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to seek “deferred action” […]
Every year the federal government decides three major economic matters 1) the amount of money that the government will spend 2) the amount of money it will raise in taxes and 3) the amount of money that it will require the private sector and states, municipalities and tribes to spend on regulatory compliance costs. The […]
Here is a little known fact about Justice Samuel Alito: in 1989, he wrote a chapter for a book entitled The RICO Racket (buy it now on Amazon for $100!). In his chapter—Racketeering Made Simple(r)—Alito described himself as “a federal prosecutor and staunch RICO supporter.” In a colorful way, his chapter runs through the basics […]
The Business History Review has a new article that should interest our readers. In Citibank, Credit Cards, and the Local Politics of National Consumer Finance, 1968-1991, Sean Vanatta (PhD candidate in history at Princeton) tells us the story of how Sioux Falls, South Dakota became a global financial center in 1981. Well, global financial center […]
Late last week President Obama announced a three-year moratorium on new coal leases on federal land. The moratorium was effected by an order from the pen of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, and it has already come under attack by congressional Republicans (I know! I was shocked, too). Several days ago, I wrote some introductory comments […]
In Business Roundtable v. SEC, 647 F.3d 1144 (D.C. Cir. 2011), the D.C. Circuit held that the SEC must justify all its regulations promulgated under the National Securities Market Improvement Act through cost benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis makes sense for many SEC regulations because they focus on easily quantified matters. But they make less sense […]
Next week I’m taking my newest project—Legislating in the Shadows—on the road with a law faculty workshop at UNLV on Monday (1/25), and another law faculty workshop at the University of Utah on Wednesday (1/27).* Thanks in advance to the law faculties at UNLV and Utah for reading the early draft of the paper and […]
In my last post, I situated FDA’s international agreements in the literature on “global administrative law” and suggested that the field’s leaders take too narrow a view of what regulators do in the process of “making” global administrative law. Their regulatory mission is often much broader than the product or sector so-described. FDA’s international agreements […]
Is the Obama administration’s deferred action program for the parents of citizens and legal permanent residents (DAPA) a legislative rule? The Fifth Circuit says it probably is, the administration swears it isn’t. The fight matters because, if DAPA is a legislative rule, it should have gone through notice and comment. With its cert grant in […]
Those of you who look for interesting news headlines buried in your Friday news feeds will have found quite an interesting little nugget on the front end of this MLK weekend. The Obama administration made good on a State of the Union hint and announced that it is initiating a moratorium on new coal leases […]
Over the weekend I mused about how “the Court does not often ‘call for the views of Texas’ or ‘call for the views of California,’ even though those sophisticated litigants may also have something to say about a petition’s certworthiness.” Since then, a reader has helpfully pointed one fairly recent example of a CVTex: Rhine […]
When it comes to appellate litigation, the color of a brief matters a lot. Judges—busy people—are particular about it because standardization helps. After all, a judge can quickly sort out the appellant’s brief from the appellee’s brief from the appendix from the amicus briefs. The importance of a color code, moreover, is especially important at […]
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is in the news this week, with a New York Times piece that highlights Margaret Kwoka‘s terrific forthcoming Duke Law Journal article FOIA, Inc.— an article Ibriefly blogged about last week. Now the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), released a staff report on its investigation […]