In the summer of 1942, Professor Henry Hart, then ten years into his career as a law professor, temporarily left the Harvard Law faculty to become an associate general counsel at the Office of Price Administration, an agency responsible for setting prices throughout the World War II-economy. Just under three years later, Hart argued the […]
One of the many far-reaching provisions of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) authorizes a voluntary program for the accreditation of third-party certification bodies, also known as auditors, to conduct food safety audits and issue certifications of foreign facilities and the foods for humans and animals they produce. FDA finalized this rule in 2015 […]
Each week I blog about the D.C. Circuit. There is a reason for this. In today’s world, we are flooded with commentary about the Supreme Court—and the law of diminishing returns is real. Thus, although the D.C. Circuit is (probably) less important than the Supreme Court, there is more “bounce to the ounce” in covering […]
I don’t envy the reading load that William Domnarski undertook on his way to writing his biography of Richard Posner. By his account in an interview, he read all of Posner’s judicial opinions, numbering some 3,000. And then he read “most of them for the second time,” and “some for the third time.” He then […]
This blog tends to focus on federal regulation or state regulation, but local regulation is also particularly important in some areas of law – particularly public health law, my area of focus. Recently, there have been coordinated efforts to limit local regulation through the use of state-level preemption. Recent examples from my home state of […]
Contrary to the old canard that “every law professor . . . can recite A Few Good Men from memory,” I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen A Few Good Men in its entirety. Sure, I’ve stumbled across snippets of it (it seems like it has been rebroadcast on TNT, I don’t know, about four […]
Everyone who has been following administrative law in recent years knows that Seminole Rock deference is controversial. Because of Seminole Rock deference (also known as Auer deference), courts—generally—defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own ambiguous regulations. (Put another way, “Auer deference is Chevron deference applied to regulations rather than statutes.”) This sort of deference […]
[Note from Daniel Hemel: Guest poster David Feder, currently an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles and formerly a law clerk to Judge Neil Gorsuch on the Tenth Circuit, has written a thoughtful response to my post last week criticizing Judge Gorsuch’s opinion in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch. This post reflects the views only […]
This post will be short, as we will be hosting a terrific online symposium in September on judicial deference to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations (a.k.a. Auer deference or Seminole Rock deference). We have a terrific line-up, including the three scholars featured in this post. But I wanted to highlight now in the […]
Earlier this year my Ohio State colleague Peter Shane and I read at our regular “book club” Leah Litman‘s Taking Care of Federal Law, which was published in the Virginia Law Review. This is such a engaging and provocative paper, and I was glad to see Peter review it for Jotwell last month. Here’s a summary of the paper […]
Reader, no doubt you have come to appreciate just how much nicer the new Notice & Comment looks compared to the old site. (Indeed, the old Notice & Comment looked a lot like this or even this.) To be sure, the transition has not been seamless; I’ve noticed a hiccup now and then. But on […]
I blogged about this project earlier in the year, but I’m excited to report that I finally have a full draft of the article, Legislating in the Shadows, which is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. This article documents a previously under-explored yet widespread practice—how agencies confidentially assist Congress in drafting statutes—and then explores […]
In the 2005 Brand X decision, the Supreme Court held that “[a] court’s prior judicial construction of a statute trumps an agency construction otherwise entitled to Chevron deference only if the prior court decision holds that its construction follows from the unambiguous terms of the statute.” Nat’l Cable & Telecomms. Ass’n v. Brand X Internet […]
Over at the Library of Law and Liberty, I had a post yesterday, entitled Do Judicial Deference Doctrines Actually Matter?, on Kent Barnett and my new article Chevron in the Circuit Courts, which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review. In that post, I briefly recap the current debate about whether to get rid of, or […]
Auer deference — the deference an agency receives when interpreting its own regulations — is one of the most powerful tools for the government in administrative law. But the doctrine has faced increasing criticism. Opponents have argued that the doctrine enables agencies to circumvent procedural safeguards by promulgating vague rules through notice and comment and […]