I’m still recovering from an exhausting but awesome Second Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable, which my colleague Peter Shane and I hosted at Ohio State last week. I completely concur in Peter’s assessment of the roundtable (which he posted on Facebook last week):

There are days that really remind you what academic life is like at its best. This week’s 2017 installment of our Annual Roundtable on New Administrative Law Scholarship brought together a group of relatively younger scholars sharing their work with a group of more experienced scholars. The works in progress were intellectually invigorating in ambition, creativity, research skill, and insight. Every bit of feedback the authors received from their colleagues, regardless of career stage, was offered constructively to help the author carry out his or her ambitions most effectively. The responses to feedback were equally collegial–neither defensive, nor unduly deferential, if I may put it that way. And this group was by no means homogeneous in terms of their normative or methodological orientations to the field. Yet the tone of mutual appreciation and the enjoyment of the conversation never flagged.

Thanks to the presenters and commenters for making it such a productive and fun event!

SSRN, of course, continued to make publicly available some really great work in administrative law. Here is the June 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:

1. Abuse of Power: The CFPB and Ocwen Financial Corp by Richard Christopher Whalen [CJW Note: As I noted last month, this author does not seem to be a very big fan of the CFPB, especially with respect to its treatment of Ocwen Financial Corp.]

2. Modernizing the Administrative Procedure Act by Christopher J. Walker (Administrative Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is my essay on the Portman-Heitkamp Regulatory Accountability Act, which was reported favorably out of committee in May. I received many helpful comments at the Hoover/Stanford reg-reform conference last month.  If you want my shorter take on the legislation, here is an essay I did for the Regulatory Review.]

3. Is Judicial Deference to Agency Fact-Finding Unlawful? by Evan D. Bernick (Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy forthcoming) [CJW Note: I had a chance to review and comment on an earlier draft of this provocative paper at a terrific conference in March hosted by Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution and the Institute for Justice.]

4. Gaming the Chevron Doctrine? by Kent H. Barnett, Christina L. Boyd & Christopher J. Walker [CJW Note: This is the second paper from Kent and my eleven-year dataset on Chevron deference in the circuit courts, and we brought on a political scientist as a coauthor to do more with our data. We received great feedback on the paper at last week’s Second Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable.]

5. The American Nondelegation Doctrine by Cass R. Sunstein [CJW Note: This is a really fascinating take on the new “American nondelegation doctrine,” which Sunstein argues is not about nondelegation per se but about clear-statement canons for Congress delegating certain interpretitive authority to federal agencies.]

6. Voluntary Remands: A Critical Reassessment by Joshua Revesz [CJW Note: As Nick Parrillo noted in his AdLaw Bridge Series feature on this paper, Revesz “provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the subject in the literature and contends that courts have adopted an overly permissive approach to the government’s requests for this kind of disposition.”]

7. Making Finance More Competitive by Rory Van Loo (UCLA Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a really fun read, arguing that the structure of financial regulation–with multiple agencies involved–is ineffective both to encourage financial technology innovation and to combat anticompetitive bank conduct.]

8. Motion and Brief for Scholar Seth Barrett Tillman as Amicus Curiae in Support of the Defendant, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, Civ. A. No. 1:17-cv-00458-RA (S.D.N.Y. June 16, 2017) (Abrams, J.) (filed by Professor Josh Blackman & Robert W. Ray, Esq.) by Seth Barrett Tillman [CJW Note: This is Tillman’s take on the Trump Emoluments Clause litigation.]

9. Computationally Assisted Regulatory Participation by Michael A. Livermore, Vladimir Eidelman and Brian Grom (Notre Dame Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: I’m a big fan of Livermore’s scholarship, and this paper is no exception. I provided comments on an earlier draft at Cornell’s Political Economy and Public Law Conference last summer. In this paper, Livermore and coauthors explain how natural language processing may be able to help federal agencies review and utilize public comments lodged during the rulemaking process.]

10. Beyond Zero-Sum Environmentalism by Shalanda Helen Baker, Robin Kundis Craig, John C. Dernbach, Keith H. Hirokawa, Sarah Krakoff, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan D. Rosenbloom, J. B. Ruhl, James E. Salzman, Inara K. Scott, and David Takacs (Environmental Law Reporter) [CJW: This is a really cool format for a minisymposium issue on a current hot topic in environmental regulation.]

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 Kaile Sepnafski for helping put together this monthly post. I’ll report back at the start of July with the next edition.