When the Department of Homeland Security makes the choice to refrain from bringing charges against an undocumented person working at a restaurant or to freeze a removal order for a woman who serves as a primary caregiver to her U.S.-citizen children, the agency is favorably exercising “prosecutorial discretion,” which refers to the decision by DHS […]

Samuel L. Bray’s forthcoming Harvard Law Review article, Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction, argues that federal courts should eschew issuing nation-wide injunctions, no matter the importance of the question litigated or the value of nation-wide uniformity.  He urges adherence to the principle that injunctions against the federal government should be “plaintiff-protective,” providing relief only to […]

Election losses bring calls for blame, and FBI Director James Comey has led the early returns. Critics continue to charge that the FBI committed errors in its investigation of Hillary Clinton and that those errors contributed to her defeat. The FBI, they argue, outran its legal writ, particularly in its summer release of its recommendation […]

This is part three of a three-part series on Judge Gorsuch. Last summer when I was taking the New York bar, I ran into an acquaintance who was an incoming clerk for one of President Trump’s Supreme Court short-listers. At some point she asked me what a judge I knew was “like,” and I replied that […]

Sanctuary cities protect undocumented aliens by adopting policies regarding: (1) inquiries into immigration status, (2) immigration-related detentions, or (3) information-sharing with federal officials. On January 25, President Trump issued Executive Order 13768, which threatens to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that violate 8 U.S.C. §1373.[1] Section 1373, part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility […]

This is part two of a three-part series on Judge Gorsuch. Does Judge Gorsuch care about precedent? The question might seem like asking if Judge Gorsuch cares about stray kittens – of course he cares about precedent. After reading his administrative-law opinions, though, one can wonder. Padilla-Caldera II In Padilla-Caldera v. Gonzales (“Padilla-Caldera I”), the Tenth […]

This is part one of a three-part series on Judge Gorsuch. In the confirmation questionnaire Judge Gorsuch submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he listed Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch first among the list of the ten most significant cases he has decided. It could hardly be otherwise. His concurring opinion in Gutierrez-Brizuela calling for the Court to […]

One of the most controversial aspects of comprehensive regulatory reform is the potential role of courts in reviewing agencies’ Regulatory Impact Analysis or other similar economic analysis that informs regulatory decisions. The Securities and Exchange Commission provides a useful case study on the effects of such judicial review. The commission’s chief economist and general counsel […]

Editor’s Note: Professor Grabowski has written a longer essay on this piece in the Yale Journal on Regulation Bulletin. You can access it here! Cell phone privacy, network neutrality and encryption are some of the many tech-related issues that Neil Gorsuch could rule on if he’s successfully appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch “needs to get tech,” writes Wired‘s Issie […]

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would likely be able to alleviate Secretary Price’s concerns about the recent CBO of the American Health Care Act if Republicans produced their comprehensive proposal for reforming Obamacare. In Monday’s CBO estimate of the American Health Care Act, CBO estimated that 24 million Americans would have health insurance and premiums […]

It is time to rethink legal and popular notions of immigration sovereignty. In the 19th Century, the Supreme Court depicted immigration as a threat to national sovereignty. It did so to support its conclusion that the political branches (Congress and the President) had extra-constitutional power over certain aspects of immigration law. In explaining why the […]

Anti-circumvention technologies were most probably not high on President Trump’s mind when he withdrew the United States as a signatory to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) last month. The TPP, as with a number of other multilateral and bilateral treaties to which the United States is a party, includes prohibitions on the circumvention of “effective technological […]

Agencies have long known that the formal promulgation of rules is a regimented process, involving codification of requirements and consideration of public comments. The natural curb on agency evasion of this onerous process is the potential threat of lawsuits under the APA, but EO 13771 generates another, possibly more stringent curb.   The Jan. 30, […]