A recent essay at the Harvard Law Review blog on the Congressional Review Act (CRA) demonstrates an earnest interest in the arcane corner of public policy where administrative law, statutory interpretation, and legislative procedure all pile up. Further, by offering a constructive reform it does something most of the peanut gallery (myself a season ticketholder) […]
While the holding in Trump v. Slaughter was limited to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Supreme Court declined to define the outer bounds of what constitutes executive power, there was enough flesh on the bones of the decision for federal commissions[1] to begin to assess whether the limits on removal for their members […]
The Eleventh Circuit decided six administrative law cases of note during August. This post will focus on three of them, all of which happen to involve transportation. The court vacated the Department of Transportation’s order ending approval of a joint venture between Delta Air Lines and Aerovias de Mexico because the agency arbitrarily departed from […]
As recounted already, the August opinion rush is in full swing at the D.C. Circuit. The Court issued 17 opinions the week of August 17 (including one opinion re-issued in a public version). Roughly eleven opinions could be described as related to admin law, but given the sheer volume, I’m excluding some cases on jurisdictional/ancillary […]
President Trump announced recently, in a post on Truth Social, that the United States is taking an ownership stake in an entity that will lease and develop Venezuelan oil fields. Is this arrangement lawful? As best I can tell, the answer is no. To my knowledge, the administration has not produced any legal justification for […]
In April, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered Disney’s ABC-owned stations to file renewal applications for eight broadcast licenses years ahead of their ordinary 2028 through 2031 expiration dates, with filings due within thirty days. The Commission said the accelerated timeline was necessary for its investigation into possible Communications Act and FCC rule violations. Disney […]
Here is the list of works included in the August 2026 Comparative Administrative Law Scholarship Corner, which is curated by Eduardo Jordão (FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro), with the assistance of Eduarda Onzi. The Scholarship Corner is a resource provided through the Comparative Administrative Law listserv. For more information about this terrific resource, check out my first […]
Meditations on our post-Slaughter world continue to populate the field’s SSRN feed, and today’s Ad Law Reading Room brings you a double header. The first entry is “‘Because The President Said So’: Agency Reason Giving and Presidential Statements of Will,” by Nina A. Mendelson, which is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here […]
Here is the list of works included in the June and July 2026 editions of the Comparative Administrative Law Scholarship Corner, which is curated by Eduardo Jordão (FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro), with the assistance of Eduarda Onzi. The Scholarship Corner is a resource provided through the Comparative Administrative Law listserv. June 2026: July 2026: For more […]
I’ve posted to SSRN a draft of a new essay, Delegation and Independent Judgment, which is my contribution to a terrific Notre Dame Law Review symposium on Congress and the administrative state. In this essay, I revisit Jonathan Adler and my 2020 article Delegation and Time, reflecting on the implications of Loper Bright independent judgment […]
What defines the Trump presidency’s approach to administration? The main themes are no doubt the turbocharged unitary executive branch, concentration of policy control in the presidency, evasion of procedural constraints on regulatory change, and clawing away of congressional spending control. I think there is another, subtler theme as well, though. In a new essay on Attempted […]
“If even an extremely simple arrangement like the three-body system is unpredictable chaos, how can we have any faith in discovering the laws of the universe?” – Liu Cixin The textbook description of federal administrative law goes as follows: This is the broadest, simplest description of how a binding policy decision goes from legislative consideration […]
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 […]
I’ve written before about the D. C. Circuit practice that a judge who has failed to circulate to the panel more than two of his assigned opinions from the term by August 15 may not hear cases in the new term that begins in September until they have been circulated. For that reason, typically there […]
Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away” –Cheap Trick (1978) “I’ve got a blank space baby / And I’ll write your name“ Thomas Berry recently flagged the Federal Vacancies Reform Act‘s front-end problem: eligibility so broad that “more than 350 federal officials [can] fill any vacant office, regardless of qualifications.” That’s a sufficient condition to […]