It has been a big summer for the unitary executive theory. The Supreme Court just handed down Trump v. Slaughter: a decisive step that continues the trend of previous decisions in consolidating control of the administrative state in the hands of the President. Here I want to explain how, for all the warranted attention it […]

The FTC’s most recent case against a data broker for illegal practices should encourage more consumer protection agencies to follow suit; but important omissions in the FTCs settlement should be considered by states. A Notable Advance in FTC Unfairness and Privacy Jurisprudence: Banning Sale of Location Data The Federal Trade Commission’s (“the Commission” or “FTC”) […]

Scholars, lawmakers, and the public alike express an intense interest in knowing what motivates judicial decision-making. Are judges like umpires, merely calling balls and strikes, as then-Judge John Roberts claimed at his confirmation hearing? Or, are they instead motivated by ideological commitments or other biases? The dominant view is that judges are driven, at least […]

In April 2026, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued the 2026 Economic Report of the President. Though seemingly not much noticed to date, Chapter 2 of that report is titled “Promoting Prosperity through Regulatory Reform”.In brief, Chapter 2 makes the case that the growth of federal regulation has imposed significant costs on the […]

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Cook seeks to resolve both narrow questions about the Federal Reserve Act’s (FRA) removal protections and the broad question of Federal Reserve independence. That the Court ruled in favor of Governor Lisa Cook was largely expected, even if it came from a slimmer 5-4 majority than some […]

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is often described as ending Chevron deference. That description is accurate, but incomplete. The more important question is what the Court expects to happen next. Viewed through an institutional lens, Loper Bright functions as a penalty default rule. For four decades, Chevron reduced the cost […]

The Trump administration’s announcement in May of a nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—created (though later blocked and perhaps abandoned) as part of a settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—raised questions about whether the parties in the lawsuit were genuinely adverse, whether the court had jurisdiction, and what role courts have in policing potentially […]

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in FCC v. AT&T might restore agency control over initial adjudications that many thought Jarkesy to forbid. As Jeff Wall (counsel for AT&T) argued, this case lets the government “drag in through the back door what in Jarkesy said you couldn’t bring through the front.” Transcript of Oral Argument at […]

On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the consolidated cases of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) v. AT&T and Verizon v. FCC (collectively, the “Carrier Cases”). In an 8-1 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that the lack of jury involvement in the FCC’s process for issuing […]

As the Supreme Court’s latest term drew to a close, the expert consensus knew where the Court would land in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. Humphrey’s Executor—and with it the constitutionality of independent agencies—would be ritually slaughtered, yet Federal Reserve independence would remain alive and well. Why was this judicial miracle so utterly […]

Recent Rulemakings Reviewed is a monthly quantitative snapshot of federal regulatory activity, drawn from FRTracker—a platform that ingests Federal Register documents and decomposes binding rules into structured “obligations.” An “obligation” in this dataset is a single regulated duty extracted from a rule’s text, comprised of: an actor (e.g., operator, employer, importer), a deontic modal (must, shall, may not), and an action. Each issue of […]