Earlier this year, former U.S. Tax Court Judge Diane Kroupa was indicted for conspiracy to commit tax evasion and obstruction of an IRS audit. During her time on the court, Kroupa authored some significant opinions, including BNY Mellon v. Commissioner, which held that the taxpayer could not properly claim foreign tax credits generated through a […]
My colleague David Zaring and I are hosting a conference in April 2017 entitled, simply enough, Financial Regulation and the Rule of Law. The papers presented are a mix of invited papers and an open call, which I am pasting below. If this topic interests you, we hope you’ll submit. The Wharton School of the […]
About six months ago, I wrote a post on dissenting opinions in the D.C. Circuit. This seems like a good week to update that post with a list of every concurrence and dissent filed in the D.C. Circuit since January 30, 2016. As an added bonus, because students are just now coming back to school, […]
Yesterday over at LegalPlanet, Dan Farber had an interesting post highlighting a right-of-center proposal for more rigorous training in law school on regulatory policy and economics: Since the days of Felix Frankfurter, the Administrative Law course has been a staple of American law schools. It’s a great course, but it’s limited. The same is true […]
Aetna has denied any link between the Justice Department’s effort to block its merger with Humana and the company’s departure from the exchanges. Turns out those denials are not so true. Jonathan Cohn and Jeff Young at the Huffington Post have unearthed a letter from Aetna’s CEO to the Justice Department before the antitrust suit […]
In the last few years, (at least) two important books on legal interpretation have been published: Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner’s Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, and then Judge Katzmann’s Judging Statutes. I have blogged a fair amount about Reading Law (posts collected here) and contributed to the Green Bag’s entertaining microsymposium on the […]
This week, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) responded to petitions requesting a redesignation of marijuana for the benefit of scientific research. The DEA refused, citing, somewhat tautologically, the fact that there are no scientifically valid and well-controlled clinical trials demonstrating benefits for certain modalities of marijuana for specific medical indications. DEA affirmed marijuana’s continued status […]
This week’s post marks an anniversary: one year of D.C. Circuit Review–Reviewed. Before summarizing the cases this week, I’ll take a moment to reflect on reading every opinion the D.C. Circuit has released since August 10, 2015.* First, from day one, I made a conscious decision to not let on whether I think the court […]
Law students go to law school for all sorts of reasons. Some dream of practicing criminal law because they watch a lot of television. Others want to be politicians and see law school as a launching pad. Many want to work for nonprofits because they care deeply about particular issues. Others want to follow in […]
In a prior post, I discussed concerns expressed by Senator Hatch regarding the IRS’s failure to subject its “major” regulations to the procedures required by the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Major regulations are generally those that have economic effects of $100 million or more and would seem to include many tax regulations. However, as […]
Back in February 2015, in the same meeting at which the FCC reclassified broadband providers as Title II common carriers, the Commission also approved an order preempting certain state laws restricting municipal broadband providers. In June, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Commission’s Title II reclassification. Yesterday, the Sixth Circuit vacated the muni broadband order. A […]
On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court issued a 4-4 ruling in the immigration case of United States v. Texas, blocking two “deferred action” programs announced by President Obama on November 20, 2014: extended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA Plus) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Residents (DAPA).[1] The 4-4 ruling […]
Altera v. Commissioner: Heads the IRS Wins, Tails the Taxpayer Loses? Last year, in Altera v. Commissioner, the Tax Court dealt the IRS a major blow on rulemaking issues. In that case, the court held that some highly-controversial international tax regulations were invalid and thus could not apply in determining Altera’s tax liabilities for the […]
A presidential election year provides a good time to reflect on administrative law scholarship addressing presidential transitions. “Midnight rulemaking” is a term used to describe the well-documented phenomenon of an increase in the volume of regulatory activity in the three months preceding a presidential administration. Scholarly literature and policy studies of midnight rulemaking are voluminous. […]
Earlier this summer at the terrific Rethinking Judicial Deference Conference sponsored by George Mason’s Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Cathy Sharkey presented a provocative paper entitled In the Wake of Chevron’s Retreat. In this paper, Professor Sharkey notes that last year the Supreme Court engaged in two types of narrowing of Chevron deference […]