Those of you who look for interesting news headlines buried in your Friday news feeds will have found quite an interesting little nugget on the front end of this MLK weekend. The Obama administration made good on a State of the Union hint and announced that it is initiating a moratorium on new coal leases […]
Over the weekend I mused about how “the Court does not often ‘call for the views of Texas’ or ‘call for the views of California,’ even though those sophisticated litigants may also have something to say about a petition’s certworthiness.” Since then, a reader has helpfully pointed one fairly recent example of a CVTex: Rhine […]
When it comes to appellate litigation, the color of a brief matters a lot. Judges—busy people—are particular about it because standardization helps. After all, a judge can quickly sort out the appellant’s brief from the appellee’s brief from the appendix from the amicus briefs. The importance of a color code, moreover, is especially important at […]
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is in the news this week, with a New York Times piece that highlights Margaret Kwoka‘s terrific forthcoming Duke Law Journal article FOIA, Inc.— an article Ibriefly blogged about last week. Now the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), released a staff report on its investigation […]
Medical privacy matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and people may not value it as much as they say they do. Here’s an analogy. If I asked you whether you think private companies should monitor your movements, you’d probably say no. You might even feel strongly about it, and understandably so. It’s […]
As I noted back in October, the Seventh Circuit decided a case Bible v. United States Aid Funds, Inc. , which Judge Easterbrook claimed was a suitable vehicle for the Supreme Court to reconsider Auer/Seminole Rock deference — the doctrine that instructs courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation unless the interpretation […]
Dear 2Ls, A couple of months ago I wrote a letter explaining that “if you hope to clerk for a federal judge after graduation,” you should be prepared to apply no later than “after first semester grades are released and law review boards turn over.” True, not all clerkship slots will be filled over the […]
As I previewed here, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) held its annual meeting in New York City last week, and there were a number of terrific panels and events on administrative law and regulation. I loved the AALS AdLaw Section’s panel on the regulatory/compliance curriculum as well as its annual New Voices Program—where […]
Here is the December 2015 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. Here’s the top ten: 1. Who Can Be President of the United States?: Candidate Hillary Clinton and the Problem of Statutory Qualifications by Seth Barrett […]
This isn’t a novel insight but it bears repeating: no two judges are the same. They grew up in different families; had different careers; have different interests; and operate with different intuitions. Yet judges in the United States—at least as a rule—wear the same uniform: a plain black robe.* Recently, however, Noah Feldman—one of the […]
It is bedrock in a democracy, of course, that the public must be able to see the text of binding law. We take for granted that we can readily view federal statutes and regulations in government publications that are freely available online and in the Federal Depository Library System. It might surprise some to learn, […]
Over at PrawfsBlawg Jay Wexler explains that Boston University School of Law has made Administrative Law part of the required 1L curriculum. This decision, and reactions to it, have me thinking about where and when we offer Administrative Law to law students and what we teach them when we do. I’ve just finished another semester […]
Justice Breyer dominated the conversation in last month’s oral argument in Liberty Mutual v. Gobeille. (You can read this for my take on the case.) Again and again, he harped on a point pressed by none of the parties: that the Court couldn’t uphold Vermont’s reporting requirement because the Department of Labor hadn’t issued a […]
There is a lot of terrific administrative law and regulation programming at the AALS Annual Meeting in New York City this week, so I thought I’d highlight the various panels and programs that may be of interest to scholars of administrative law and regulation (defined broadly). In addition to the official AALS programming, I’ve included […]
At 12:02 last night, one of my (very tired) children made a keen observation: “New Years is a silly holiday.” I sympathize. We don’t celebrate turning the calendar from January to February, nor do we throw a party when February 29th rolls around every Olympiad.* But you know what? The fact that January 1st is […]