The D.C. Circuit issued only one opinion last week, and it wasn’t about administrative law. (The case involved a civil contempt motion to enforce an injunction that protected free-exercise rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.) The court did hear arguments on several administrative-law cases, including: More opinions to come soon!
Here is the December 2024 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. 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 […]
On January 27, the Trump administration directed federal agencies to pause the obligation and disbursement of all federal financial assistance. This is the first shot in an impending struggle over impoundment, which is a President’s refusal to spend Congressional appropriations on time, or at all. Former Trump administration officials and current nominees for the new administration have repeatedly argued that the President has […]
An argument lurking just beneath the surface in a pending Fifth Circuit case could stem the bleeding from the Supreme Court’s decision in SEC v. Jarkesy. Last summer, Jarkesy held that agencies seeking to impose monetary penalties on enforcement targets for securities fraud and other common law-ish claims must proceed in court, not their own administrative forums. Now, Burgess v. […]
The D.C. Circuit decided four administrative law cases last week. This post focuses on Cigar Association of America v. FDA. The district court (Mehta, J.) vacated an FDA regulation on the ground that it arbitrarily and capriciously applied to “premium cigars.” In an opinion by Judge Randolph, the D.C. Circuit agreed on the merits. But it […]
The D.C. Circuit published two opinions in the week of January 13th. Both involved FERC, and the more interesting of the two raised questions about standing doctrine. Industrial Energy Consumers of America v. FERC was the standing case. The petitioners, various organizations representing energy consumers, petitioned for review of FERC orders granting stage one approval […]
On Tuesday, many law students received a rather unfortunate email from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Attorney Recruitment & Management. The email read: “This email is about your application to the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Pursuant to the hiring freeze announced January 20, 2025, your job offer has been revoked.” Soon, rumors spread […]
This is a quick post to share some easy-to-read explainers about what different agency heads and civil servants do, how the civil service works, and Trump’s early and antagonistic actions towards our civil service system. Sometimes the government can seem like a black box. My view is that as you hear about early actions of […]
In a recent post in this space, “The (Likely) End of the FCC’s Long-Running Net Neutrality Saga,” I explained why the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Ohio Telecom Association v. FCC on January 2 likely signals the end of the FCC’s lengthy history of imposing, abandoning, and reimposing “net neutrality” mandates on Internet service providers, […]
Doctors learn about removing stitches. Dentists train to take off those pesky braces. Lawyers, however, spend little of their education studying when a law needs to come off the books. This isn’t a new problem. As noted by Karl Llewellyn in 1935, law students come to think that “for too much law, more law will be […]
The Supreme Court’s recent decisions on deference and delegation have attracted enormous attention from judges, policymakers, lawyers, and scholars — and rightly so. But those debates have overshadowed other significant shifts in the courts’ review of administrative actions. Among them is “hard look review”—the courts’ review of an agency’s analysis and explanations, under the Administrative […]
The University of Michigan Law School is very pleased to host the Tenth Annual Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable on May 19-20, 2025. For the past nine years, the Roundtable has offered administrative law scholars an excellent opportunity to get feedback on their work from distinguished scholars in a collaborative setting. Approximately twelve authors will […]
Six years after the Supreme Court took on the question in Gundy v. United States, 588 U.S. 128 (2019), of when, if ever, Congress has unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the executive branch, the Court will try again to articulate a standard that a majority of the Court can accept. The case is FCC v. […]
On January 14, 2025, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) announced that it is seeking researchers to serve as consultants on five new projects directed towards the development of formal recommendations to agencies, Congress, and the President. The consultant(s) selected for each project will, among other things, prepare a report, work with a […]
Today’s Ad Law Reading Room entry is “The Administrative State’s Second Face,” by Emily Chertoff and Jessica Bulman-Pozen, which is forthcoming in the NYU Law Review. Here is the abstract: We often assume that there is one administrative state, with one body of administrative law that governs it. In fact, the administrative state has two […]