A sincere thank you to Peter Conti-Brown for his efforts to reach the public in his book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. First, I begin by revealing that my practice is far removed geographically and figuratively from those who ponder the rationale for the power and independence of the Federal Reserve. My […]

Administrative law doctrine and scholarship has traditionally treated agencies as unitary entities and focused upon the proper allocation of authority among agencies, the President, Congress, and the courts. Recently, however, scholars have begun to unlock the “black box” of agency design to identify and evaluate the ways in which administrative law rules allocate decisionmaking authority […]

Peter Conti-Brown’s terrific study of the Federal Reserve arrives amid a small boomlet—I won’t say “bubble”—of new books on our central bank: Roger Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve; former Chairman Bernanke’s memoir, The Courage to Act; similar memoirs by former Chairman Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Geithner; Philip Wallach’s […]

My thanks to Chris Walker for organizing this symposium and inviting me to participate. It’s a pleasure to be involved and an honor to be among such an impressive line-up of scholars and experts. Like yesterday morning’s contributor, Sam Halabi, the Federal Reserve System is not my area of expertise, but I very much enjoyed […]

There is a rumor out there (which may have just started with this post) that one out of every thirteen copies of Peter Conti-Brown’s new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve includes a chapter exploring how over the last century the Freemasons have influenced and in some respect controlled the form and […]

Let me begin by echoing Daniel’s thanks to Chris, the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment team, and Peter for the opportunity to reach outside my scholarly comfort zone and hopefully play a useful role in illuminating the importance of Peter’s book not only for scholars of the Federal Reserve system but the legal […]

I’m excited to announce that over the next week or so we will be hosting an online symposium reviewing my co-blogger Peter Conti-Brown’s important new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , which was just published by the Princeton University Press. Here’s an overview of the book from the publisher’s website: The […]

Thanks to Chris Walker for organizing this online symposium, to the editors of the Yale Journal on Regulation for hosting it on their site, and—most of all—to Peter Conti-Brown for writing a brilliant book. In this post, I’ll take issue with one of Peter’s conclusions—that “the [Federal] Reserve Banks are almost certainly unconstitutional” (p. 107)—but […]

The primary reason for the decline of immigration exceptionalism is that plenary power has become “subject to important constitutional limitations,” as the Supreme Court said in Zadvydas v. Davis. We do not yet have a complete picture of what all of those constitutional limitations are. We also know that plenary power has not entirely disappeared, […]

In many ways, the burgeoning study of the bounds of the President’s power lies at the intersection of administrative and immigration law. A related area in which I have a special interest is the exercise of power by officials below the level of the president. In my view, the rich literature on agencies’ activity is […]

Donald Trump’s suggestion that we temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from entering the country sent shockwaves through the American psyche. Yet even more shocking, to some, is that Trump’s idea might be constitutional. For more than a century, the Supreme Court has crafted and maintained special doctrines for immigration that depart from mainstream legal norms. If […]

The exercise of prosecutorial discretion or “PD” is an important feature in the immigration system. It requires each DHS component to make decisions about whether a person legally eligible for immigration enforcement should still be allowed to reside in the United States on a temporary basis. PD recognizes that in a universe of limited resources, […]

Thanks to the Obama Administration it seems a lot of scholars in immigration law and administrative law are starting to ponder more deeply the question presented by this online symposium: Is Immigration Law Administrative Law? To borrow a line from Justice Scalia’s Brand X dissent, “It is indeed a wonderful new world that the [Obama […]

What kind of law is immigration law? Is immigration law its own, exceptional creature, independent of all other areas of law? Or, is immigration law more porous, absorbing features of other closely related areas of law? Questions like these have challenged immigration law for some time. Even going back to the Nineteenth Century, the Supreme […]