Here is the May 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: The author does not seem to be a very big fan of the CFPB, especially with respect to its treatment of Ocwen Financial Corp.]

2. Strategies of Public UDAP Enforcement by Prentiss Cox, Amy Widman & Mark Totten (Harvard Journal on Legislation forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a fascinating look at how public actors have used unfair and deceptive acts and practices statutes as a means of regulating.]

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. 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 just posted to SSRN a substantially revised draft of this essay. If you want my shorter take on the legislation, here is an essay I did for the Regulatory Review.]

5. The Law Presidents Make by Daphna Renan (Virginia Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: I read an earlier draft of this paper that Renan presented at the First Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable at Michigan State last summer. The paper, which analyzes the transformation of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is even more timely today than last summer.]

6. The Case of the Frozen Trucker: A Collage and Homage by Mila Sohoni [CJW Note: Channeling Lon Fuller, this is a fun fictional opinion based on the “frozen trucker case” discussed at length during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Gorsuch confirmation in March.]

7. 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.”]

8. Regulating Business Innovation as Policy Disruption: From the Model T to Airbnb by Eric Biber, Sarah E. Light, J. B. Ruhl & James E. Salzman (Vanderbilt Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: Wow, a great collaboration by four terrific scholars on how business innovation can spark policy disruption and how regulators should respond.]

9. Sticky Regulations by Aaron Nielson (University of Chicago Law Review forthcoming) [CJW Note: This is a really fun paper by my occasional coauthor that advances the counter-intuitive argument for the pro-regulatory benefits of ossification.]

10. The Administrative Origins of Constitutional Rights and Global Constitutionalism by Moshe Cohen-Eliya & Iddo Porat [CJW: This looks like a fascinating comparative piece on American and European administrative law and constitutional law, in which the authors argue things are different because conlaw came before adlaw in the US and vice versa in Europe.]

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.