This spring has produced a lot of great administrative law scholarship and a robust and exciting summer reading list. Here is the March 2019 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. Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative by Julian Davis Mortenson (Columbia Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a fascinating historical dive into presidential power with a new, narrower definition of Article II “executive power.” Definitely worth adding to the summer reading list!]
2. Neoclassical Administrative Law by Jeffrey A. Pojanowski (Harvard Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: I read an earlier draft of this paper for our Third Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable held at U Mich last summer, and it’s a fantastic article suggesting how to reconcile a formalist, classical approach to law with the modern regulatory state.]
3. Engineering the Modern Administrative State, Part I: Political Accommodation and Legal Strategy in the New Deal Era by Daniel B. Rodriguez & Barry R. Weingast [CJW Note: Anything by Rodriguez and Weingast is a must-read, and this article is no exception. In what appears to be the first in a series, this article attempts to reconcile two different New Deal stories on the rise of the modern administrative state.]
4. United States Constitutional Law: Chapter 1 (Introduction) by Daniel A. Farber & Neil Siegel [CJW Note: This is the intro to Farber and Siegel’s new Concepts and Insights Series guide to U.S. Constitutional Law, which can be purchased here.]
5. Civil Servant Disobedience by Jennifer Nou (94 Chicago-Kent Law Review 349 (2019)) [CJW Note: Nou is doing important work on bureaucratic resistance, and this is her contribution to a terrific Chicago-Kent Law Review administrative law symposium held last year, which Peter Strauss organized and I had the privilege of attending as a respondent. If you’re craving more on bureaucratic resistance, Nou and I did a podcast on the subject for the University of Chicago Law Review, available here.]
6. An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act by Kate Andrias (128 Yale Law Journal 616 (2019)) [CJW Note: Wow, this is a great read — a rich account of the FLSA’s industry committees in the 1930s and 1940s and what that might mean for our understanding of labor and employment law.]
7. Presidential Laws and the Missing Interpretive Theory by Tara Leigh Grove (University of Pennsylvania Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: Another important paper by Grove, this one developing a textualist interpretive theory for presidential laws (executive orders, proclamations, etc.).]
8. Clowning Around with Final Agency Action by Beau Baumann & Greg Mina (Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is an interesting student note arguing against a formalistic approach to the APA’s final agency action requirement.]
9. Dog Whistles and Beachheads: The Trump Administration, Sexual Violence & Student Discipline in Education by Nancy Chi Cantalupo (Wake Forest Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This article, as the title suggests, criticizes the Trump Administration’s proposed approach to Title IX and its implications for discrimination law more generally.]
10. When Robots Make Legal Mistakes by Susan C. Morse (Oklahoma Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a really fun contribution to a symposium on lawyering in the AI age on legal decision-making robots and when their decisions should be considered final.]

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 Sam Lioi for helping put together this monthly post. I’ll report back in May with the next edition.