Category Archives: Administrative Law
Feb 29, 2016 Adrian VermeuleAdministrative Law
Some readers value an article for logical rigor, some for sound judgment, some for immediate utility, some for originality, and so on into N dimensions. (We may value more than one dimension, of course, but not “all of the above,” because the desirable traits may trade off against one another, at a frontier; no one piece can display all of them simultaneously and to a maximum degree). The peculiar excellence of richness is on display in Administrative War by Tino Cuellar, formerly of Stanford, now molted into a higher form of life as Justice Cuellar of the California Supreme Court. Cuellar recounts the history of the administrative state during the Second World War, and connects it to the surrounding political conflicts and developments in legal theory. There is no single thesis, no one-sentence nugget. Rather we are treated to a kind of legal-historical cornucopia. Cuellar’s story undermines conventional wisdom on a number of critical issues in administrative law. Let me attempt to lay out some of the wealth of interesting points that emerge.
1. The New Deal and the War. Cuellar’s basic narrative recounts the arc of the administrative state just before and during the Second World War. Administrative lawyers, particularly critics of the administrative state, still talk about “the New Deal” as though it were the moment when the Rule of Law gave way to the administrative state (and as though “the New Deal” were all one thing or era, as opposed to a pastiche of movements and developments). Distilling, synthesizing and translating-for-lawyers a library of background literature, Cuellar explains that the war, rather than the New Deal, represented the key “inflection point” in the growth of the administrative state. Furthermore, unlike World War I, which gave rise to a number of more or less temporary bureaucracies, the burgeoning administrative state was cemented into place during and by World War II, and by the odd political consensus that created the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946—a key legitimating mechanism for Leviathan. The pedagogical implication of all this is that the constitutional conflicts of the 1930s, which occupy so much space in public law courses, should at a minimum be supplemented and probably partly displaced by a study of the bureaucratic developments of the war years. Less time on the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which did not provide an enduring model for the American administrative state; more time on (entities like) the War Production Board (WPB) and the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which did. Continue reading "Leviathan Had a Good War"
Feb 1, 2016 Mila SohoniAdministrative Law
Jacob E. Gersen & Matthew C. Stephenson,
Over-Accountability, 6
Journal of Legal Analysis 185 (2014).
Many an administrative law article ends with a simple and appealing recommendation: “just add accountability!” Accountability, along with institutional expertise and democratic legitimacy, is one of the key yardsticks that frames evaluations of the legal rules and institutions of the regulatory state. Why might judicial deference to agency interpretations of statutes be desirable? Because agencies are more politically accountable than courts. Why might privatization be worrisome? Because corporations are less accountable than agencies. Accountability, like motherhood and apple pie, is something we can all safely get behind.
Or is it? In Over-Accountability, Jacob Gersen and Matthew Stephenson look at the downsides of augmenting the accountability of political institutions. Lots of ways exist to add accountability to governmental decision-making: one could have more elections, or concentrate power in a “unitary” executive, or reduce the power of politically unaccountable Article III courts. As the authors point out, these and other such accountability-enhancing moves might actually have a surprising and perverse consequence: they might exacerbate bad behavior by the government. Continue reading "Too Much of a Good Thing"
Dec 16, 2015 Cary CoglianeseAdministrative Law
Connor Raso,
Agency Avoidance of Rulemaking Procedures, 67
Admin. L. Rev. 1 (2015), available at
SSRN.
It is puzzling. Administrative agencies continue to produce thousands of rules each year in the face of an accumulation of procedural requirements that administrative law scholars say have ossified rulemaking and even led some agencies to retreat from rulemaking altogether.
How can this be? How can federal regulatory output be “rising steadily for decades” notwithstanding procedures that have created a supposedly “confusing labyrinth through which agencies seeking to adopt rules must grope”? As someone who has long been puzzled by the seeming contradiction between expectations and reality, I liked reading Connor Raso’s recent article, Agency Avoidance of Rulemaking Procedures, because it offers a persuasive, even if partial, answer to a core conundrum about rulemaking, along with thoughtfully-analyzed, supportive empirical evidence. Continue reading "Rulemaking’s Puzzles"
Nov 20, 2015 Kathryn WattsAdministrative Law
Agencies routinely interpret statutes while drafting rules. Yet very little is known about how agency rule drafters approach statutory interpretation when writing rules. In a fascinating article that was recently published in the Stanford Law Review, Professor Christopher J. Walker shines some much needed light into this area.
Walker’s article is modeled off of important empirical work Lisa Bressman and Abbe Gluck previously conducted that studied congressional drafters’ knowledge of and use of different administrative law doctrines and interpretive tools. Rather than focusing on congressional drafters as Bressman and Gluck already have done, Walker’s article focuses on how agency rule drafters approach statutory interpretation when writing rules. Walker’s article reports the findings of a detailed 195-question survey that he administered online over a five-month period to agency rule drafters who work at seven executive agencies (Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development, and Transportation) and two independent agencies (the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Reserve). Walker sent the survey to 411 agency officials within these agencies, and 128 responded, resulting in a 31 percent response rate. All of the survey respondents were career civil servants rather than political appointees. Continue reading "Shining Some Light into the Black Box of Agency Statutory Interpretation"
Oct 30, 2015 Christopher WalkerAdministrative Law
Last Term the Court gave administrative law scholars a lot to digest. Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice in King v. Burwell reinvigorated the major questions doctrine as a Chevron Step Zero inquiry, Justice Scalia in Michigan v. EPA ruled that the EPA must consider costs when a statute says to take action that is “appropriate and necessary,” and Justice Sotomayor in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers abolished the D.C. Circuit’s Paralyzed Veterans doctrine. The separate writings were perhaps even more intriguing. In Mortgage Bankers, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas all indicated some appetite to revisit Auer deference. In Mortgage Bankers and the Amtrak case, Justice Thomas questioned the modern administrative state on separation of powers and nondelegation grounds, and then wrapped up the Term in Michigan v. EPA arguing that Chevron deference itself raises serious separation of powers concerns (and Justice Scalia may have suggested something similar in Mortgage Bankers).
These decisions all deal with foundational principles in administrative law. One decision, however, also grapples with the fringe: Department of Transportation v. Association of Railroads. At issue there was a congressionally created corporation—Amtrak—and its congressionally delegated authority to engage in joint rulemaking with a more traditional federal agency, the Federal Railroad Administration. The D.C. Circuit had held that Congress could not delegate regulatory power to Amtrak because it was a private corporation (at least for rulemaking purposes). The Supreme Court reversed, holding that Amtrak is a government entity for constitutional rulemaking delegation purposes. Continue reading "Fringe Administrative Law"
Sep 18, 2015 Jacob E. GersenAdministrative Law
Sharon Jacobs,
The Administrative State’s Passive Virtues, 66 Admin. L. Rev. 565 (2014), available at
SSRN.
The federal bureaucracy has long been accused of torpor. Administrative agencies, we are oft told, take years to do much of anything. Whether this supposed-sluggishness is because of intentional institutional design, judicial review, administrative preference, or the inherent conservativeness of bureaucracy is unclear. In recent years, moreover, the core descriptive claim that agencies are too slow and do too little has been significantly undermined. Nevertheless, positive accounts of administrative delay are rare and under-theorized. Sharon Jacobs’s The Administrative State’s Passive Virtues is a long overdue updating and application of Bickel’s notion of the passive virtues in the context of courts, as applied and developed for the Administrative State.
To oversimplify a bit, Bickel argued that given the counter-majoritarian nature of courts in the United States, judicial actors can, do, and should utilize justiciability doctrines to avoid or defer deciding certain difficult or politically controversial cases. This practice of avoiding certain decisions was said to be desirable because it avoided potential attacks from the other branches or citizens and allowed the other branches with a better democratic pedigree to decide difficult political issues. Though well-known and rhetorically powerful, Bickel’s passive virtues suffered a mix of acute and chronic intellectual beatings. But Bickel’s ghost remains a powerful trope in modern constitutional law and Jacobs’s point is not that Bickel was right about courts. Rather, it is that agencies have similar structural characteristics to courts in the ways that motivate Bickel and that we lack a theory or really even a concept of administrative passive virtues. Until now. Continue reading "The Administrative Passive Voice"
Aug 5, 2015 Jodi ShortAdministrative Law
The recent paper that has most provoked my thinking about administrative law is not a paper about administrative law at all, it is a paper about corporate governance. The Corporate Governance Obsession, by Mariana Pargendler is an account and a critique of the turn to corporate governance as a means of addressing social and economic issues that were once predominantly the concern of government regulation. By “corporate governance” Pargendler means the internal decision-making processes of corporations—in particular, the balance of power among shareholders, boards of directors, and managers. The article makes the case that internal corporate governance structures increasingly provide both the explanation for and a one-size-fits-all solution to pressing issues in policy arenas as diverse as systemic financial risk, income inequality, gender discrimination, labor rights, and environmental protection.
Why should administrative lawyers care? Because, she argues, corporate governance approaches to these issues are cannibalizing regulatory approaches that externally impose rules to influence the substance and outcomes of corporate conduct. Policy debate on the central social and economic issues of the day is no longer (or at least no longer exclusively) about how regulators should design and implement rules to shape the substance of corporate conduct in the public interest, but rather about how corporations should organize their own internal decision-making processes to address issues of public concern. This means that while we administrative lawyers occupy ourselves with our own obsessions—for instance the finer points of deference doctrine and regulatory review—the corporate governance obsession is chipping away at the substantive regulatory policies that made these issues relevant in the first place. Continue reading "Administrative Law and the Corporate Governance Obsession"
Jul 6, 2015 Richard PierceAdministrative Law
I thought I had a good general understanding of the confirmation process until I read Professor O’Connell‘s enlightening study. Some of the findings were about what I expected. Thus, for instance, both the rate at which nominees fail to be confirmed and the time required for confirmation have increased significantly between 1981 and 2014. The failure rate was 26.4% in the George W. Bush Administration and 28.0% in the Obama Administration, compared with an average failure rate of 4.4% to 10% during the period 1885 to 2008. The average confirmation time was 127.1 days in the Obama Administration, compared with an average confirmation time of 88.5 days over the 33-year period of the study. The results of the high rate of failure and the lengthening delays are disconcerting. At any point in time, between 15% and 25% of senior agency positions are vacant.
As I would have predicted, the failure rate was four times higher in the last year of an Administration than in the first year of an Administration. Also as predicted, the 2013 reduction in the number of Senate votes required to enable an up or down vote on a judicial nominee from 60 to 50, at a time when the President’s party had a majority in the Senate, reduced both the number of failed nominations for judgeships and the average time until a nominee for a judgeship was confirmed.
Many of Professor O’Connell’s findings differed significantly from my expectations, however. Continue reading "The Reasons for Failures and Delays in Confirming Nominees Are More Complicated than We Think"
Jun 8, 2015 William FunkAdministrative Law
Adrian Vermeule, ‘
No’ (Review of Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
),
Texas L.Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Last year, the University of Chicago Press published “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” by Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at the Columbia University School of Law. A book by a named professor at a top-ten school published by a respected academic publisher with a provocative title would seem to be a must-read book for adlaw aficionados. His conclusion is that administrative law is unlawful, root and branch, because it is unlawful for administrative agencies to issue any rule or order that binds private parties. This is more than provocative; it is radical. Radically wrong. So wrong, one might wonder how it came to be published, and in any case so wrong that no one would take it seriously. Not so fast. In March, Justice Thomas cited it extensively in his concurrence in Department of Transportation v. Ass’n of American Railroads, 2015 WL 998536 (2015) to support his conclusion that the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority, concluding:
We have too long abrogated our duty to enforce the separation of powers required by our Constitution. We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure.
In his review of the book, Adrian Vermeule, the John H. Watson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, steps up to be the Dr. Van Helsing to drive the stake through the heart of this vampire. He minces no words:
The book makes crippling mistakes about the administrative law of the United States; it misunderstands what that body of law actually holds and how it actually works. As a result the legal critique, launched by five-hundred-odd pages of text, falls well wide of the target.
And that’s just the beginning. Continue reading "Is Administrative Law Unlawful? NO!"
May 5, 2015 Peter ShaneAdministrative Law
Margo Schlanger’s article, Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap, is an important contribution to both administrative and national security law. She explains in illuminating detail how the NSA, the hub of so much controversial electronic surveillance activity, is not a rogue enterprise, but deeply enmeshed in and committed to a complex regime of legal compliance. The question she poses is why so elaborate a compliance system is seemingly ineffective in advancing civil liberties values more robustly. Her argument is thematically related to an earlier and equally thoughtful paper, Offices of Goodness: Influence Without Authority in Federal Agencies (reviewed here), which likewise explored the difficulties for administrative agencies in honoring overarching values that are relevant to their programs, but which may appear as orthogonal to a particular agency’s specific primary objectives. (Think about the Department of Transportation promoting park land conservation or the Army Corps of Engineers protecting endangered species.)
Professor Schlanger argues that, within the NSA, the applicable legal rules are insufficient to induce a proper balance between the likely security gains from a particular surveillance initiative and the privacy and civil liberties risks and costs entailed in that initiative. Constitutional restrictions won’t produce the optimal balance between costs and benefits because the scope of constitutional rights doesn’t turn on that balance. Policy is not a major factor driving constitutional interpretation concerning the scope of individual privacy rights, especially where courts may not fully grasp the privacy implications of programs under review. (And, of course, private lawsuits are likely to exert little leverage over the intelligence community because the state secrets doctrine will insulate many government practices from effective—or any—judicial challenge.) Continue reading "Getting from “May We?” to “Should We?” at the NSA"
