The D.C. Circuit held its Bench and Bar Judicial Conference in Colonial Williamsburg on June 23-26. In addition to the obligatory session on AI (led by Stanford’s Dan Ho), a review of the Supreme Court term (with Irv Gornstein, Kelsi Corkran, Roman Martinez, and Jeff Wall), and moving tributes to recently departed judges (Judge Urbina […]
In June, a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit deepened a circuit split on a jurisdictional issue in immigration law. Judge Brasher, joined by Chief Judge Pryor, agreed with the Ninth Circuit and held that a court of appeals lacks jurisdiction to review the denial of relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) unless the immigrant petitions […]
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 […]
The D.C. Circuit issued six administrative-law decisions last week. Several represent the latest installment in protracted legal battles, making for some complicated (or at least long) procedural histories. Taking the prize for the oldest dispute is Baxley v. Driscoll, which began with Baxley’s “Other than Honorable Conditions” discharge from the Army fifty years ago, in […]
In the last 15 years, the Supreme Court has rewritten the textbooks on administrative law. The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center seeks papers that address how lawmakers and regulators are responding to the revolution in administrative law wrought by the Roberts Court. Below, we have provided examples of possible subjects. This is a non-exclusive […]
We have begun the development of panels for the 2026 ABA Administrative Law Conference, which will be held virtually December 3-4, 2026. We expect to have twenty panels on various topics. In particular, we would like to include panels on the following topics: (1) the state of policymaking delegation and judicial deference after Loper Bright; (2) […]
Today’s Ad Law Reading Room entry is “Sidelining the Public,” by Anya Bernstein, Glen Staszewski, and Wendy E. Wagner, which was recently posted to SSRN and published by the Arizona Law Review. Here is the abstract: This Article challenges the widely held view that Congress is the American government’s institution closest to the people, while […]
The D.C. Circuit issued two orders and two opinions in administrative law cases last week. The court denied a stay of an injunction against DHS’s policy for congressional visits to detention facilities (and Judge Rao explored a broad theory of irreparable injury). The court denied an administrative stay of a permanent injunction to remove President […]
Data-driven journalism uses or creates databases from culling and cleaning up government records and databases to tell important news stories, often ones serving to hold federal, state, or local governments accountable.[1] But such journalism is costly. Part of that expense is the cost of obtaining government records, and part is the expense entailed in making […]
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 […]
“There’s something about black holes that draws in scientists and the rest of us terrestrial dwellers,” lawyers included. Last week, however, the D.C. Circuit concluded that the military is not a constitutional “black hole of futile claims.” The case was Talbott v. United States. (See here and here for news coverage about the case, and here for a prior D.C. Circuit order […]
Are we all pragmatists now? Eleven years after Justice Kagan’s famous quip, there may be a “realignment,” or, perhaps, an “alignment” between textualists and non-textualists. At least, that’s what Richard Re recently argued. In a characteristically insightful blog, Re takes note of a recent article by Alana Frederick and Judge Kevin Newsom—two card-carrying textualists. They […]
In a variety of cases, Justice Neil Gorsuch has stated that government regulation of private conduct should be difficult to adopt and to sustain in court challenges because it infringes on the liberty of the regulated actor. His writings typically frame regulatory questions as a conflict between individual liberty and overbearing government agencies. This theme […]
David Doniger is an old friend and a skilled advocate, and his account of the Clean Power Plan litigation is characteristically well written. But having been inside the federal government during this period, I have a somewhat different perspective — one that complicates the narrative that the Supreme Court’s intervention was simply a conservative majority […]
Last summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) received a PowerPoint presentation introducing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool: SweetREX, named after its creator, a third-year undergraduate in economics. Consistent with the Trump administration’s stated goal of eliminating 50 percent of all federal rules by the first anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s […]