It’s a new year for administrative law scholarship, one full of promise with so many fascinating adlaw issues arising with a change in presidential administration. We have new executive orders and other executive actions, chatter about the removal of the CFPB director, agencies with new leadership with new agendas, unified government with perhaps unusual alliances for regulatory reform legislation, Congressional Review Act legislative activity, potential contempt orders for agency noncompliance with judicial orders, and a new Supreme Court nominee who is an on-the-record Chevron deference skeptic — just to name a few fascinating adlaw issues. So us adlaw scholars have a lot to write about.

In the meantime, here is the January 2017 edition of the most-downloaded recent papers (those announced in the last 60 days) from SSRN’s U.S. Administrative Law eJournal, which is edited by Bill Funk. It looks like we still have a fair number of holdover articles from last year, but with the law review submission season just beginning I expect next month’s reading list will include a lot of new stuff. Here’s the current list:

1. Changing Climate Change, 2009-2016: A Preliminary Report by Cass R. Sunstein [CJW Note: This is Professor Sunstein’s retrospective on the Obama Administration’s attempts to regulate climate change and includes a roadmap for continuing executive action in this area in an era of legislative gridlock.]

2. Is Cost-Benefit Analysis the Only Game in Town? by Gregory C. Keating [CJW Note: This is a timely piece, arguing for safety and feasibility standards as alternatives to cost-benefit analysis in some circumstances.]

3. Crackdowns by Mila Sohoni (Virginia Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: I featured this terrific article in the AdLaw Bridge Series last month here. This paper was also honored with the Junior Scholars Award by the AALS Section on Criminal Justice.]

4. Rise of the Digital Regulator by Rory Van Loo (Duke Law Journal forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a fascinating read at the intersection of administrative law and technology/big data/privacy.]

5. The Obama War Powers Legacy and Internal Forces that Entrench Executive Power by Rebecca Ingber (American Journal of International Law forthcoming) [CJW Note: This seems like a fascinating look inside the Executive Branch with respect to war powers.]

6. Presidential Maladministration by Josh Blackman [CJW Note: This is a provocative, must-read for adlaw nerds, especially with the change in presidential administration.]

7. The Constitution of Agency Statutory Interpretation by Evan J. Criddle (69 Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc 325 (2016)) [CJW Note: This is Professor Criddle’s response to Aaron Saiger’s provocative Vanderbilt Law Review article Agencies’ Obligation to Interpret the Statute.]

8. Against Remedial Restraint in Administrative Law by Christopher Walker (Columbia Law Review Online forthcoming) [CJW Note: As I blogged about in January, this is my response to my co-blogger Nick Bagley’s provocative article Remedial Restraint in Administrative Law, which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review. Kathryn Watts also has a great Jotwell review of the article entitled Rethinking Remedies.]

9. Is Cost-Benefit Analysis a Foreign Language? by Cass R. Sunstein (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology forthcoming) [CJW Note: Spoiler alert, but Professor (and former OIRA Administrator) says “in a sense” yes, and that means that cost-benefit analysis “reduces the risk that people will rely on intuitions that cause serious errors.”]

10. Judging Aggregate Settlement by David Michael Jaros & Adam Zimmerman (Washington University Law Review forthcoming) [CJW: I love anything Professor Zimmerman writes, and this is no exception.]

For more on why SSRN and this eJournal are such terrific resources for administrative law scholars and practitioners, check out my first post on the subject here. You can check out the full rankings, updated daily, here.

Thanks to my terrific research assistant Brooks Boron for helping put together this monthly post. I’ll report back at the start of March with the next edition.