Earlier this month we hosted a terrific online symposium reviewing my co-blogger Peter Conti-Brown’s important new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, which was recently published by the Princeton University Press. The contributions to the symposium were diverse and thought-provoking. For ease of reference, I thought I’d include links to all of […]

What a pleasure it has been to read these reviews. As I set out to write The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , this very audience—serious scholars and practitioners of administrative law who had thought hard about institutional design in other contexts besides the Fed—weighed heavily as one of the primary groups of […]

Readers are hard to please. It is bad enough that we criticize books that we could not even begin to write. But even worse, when an author has penned something that we like, all too often our response is not “thank you” but rather “more please”—and sometimes we don’t say “please.” I confess that after […]

When an independent agency is created, from whom does it gain independence – the President, Congress, or the people? Maybe the better question is whether it is really independent at all. One thing in particular that caught my eye is Peter Conti-Brown’s focus in Part III on the independence of the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) […]

I join my fellow colleagues in praising Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. The book provides an insightful history of the Federal Reserve since its 1913 inception and is a powerful account of the extent to which “personnel is policy.” In particular, I note his nuanced understanding of “agency independence” as […]

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 […]