The D.C. Circuit’s theme today was, of all things, the Bible. Start with Settling Devotional Claimants v. CRB. The case concerns whether the (now constitutional) Copyright Royalty Board correctly divvied up a pool of royalties among “religious ministries that own copyrights for devotional television programming.” Certain “Devotional Claimants” argued, among other things, that “the Royalty […]
As the Chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) is one of the most important figures in Washington and Wall Street. Among his targets is reforming the Fed, including the Fed’s governance. Recently, Senator Shelby has announced that he has a bone to pick with the Obama Administration on this score. […]
A long-running dispute over the First Amendment flared up this past Friday, when a federal judge in New York told FDA that it couldn’t prevent a drug manufacturer from discussing research supporting an off-label use of its drug. The drug at issue is Vascepa, the active ingredient of which is an omega-3 fatty acid. It’s […]
Interesting news for admin law aficionados. The Administrative Conference of the United States –ACUS—is hiring. If you really love administrative law, it is hard to imagine a better place to spend some time.
Sometimes a gridlocked Congress means that an energized President and ambitious state lawmakers compete to solve the Nation’s social problems. But this competition may not make for innovative solutions. Instead, it may make more for more gridlock. Consider Texas v. United States. There a cadre of states have sued to stop President Obama’s deferred action […]
Back in July 2014, a panel of three D.C. Circuit judges on the rejected Sissel v. HHS, the big Origination Clause challenge to the Affordable Care Act. In the plaintiffs’ view, the ACA didn’t comply with the Origination Clause, which requires all bills for raising revenue to “originate” in the House of Representatives. As such, […]
Now that I have finished clerking and am back in the scholarly trenches, I’m trying to catch up on a year’s worth of administrative law scholarship. (Why, you ask, didn’t I read more law review articles during my clerkship? Because no one at the Supreme Court reads law review articles anymore. *) And the first […]
So I am the newest contributor to this blog. I teach administrative law and federal courts at Brigham Young University. I plan on blogging about D.C. Circuit administrative law decisions in a regular feature dubbed D.C. Circuit Review – Reviewed. The feature will begin later this month. Today, however, merits a special post. Friday morning […]
In my prior post, I discussed how the IRS has flouted the Administrative Procedure Act in issuing proposed regulations regarding tax-motivated “fee waiver” transactions undertaken by private equity firms. Although the IRS has long disregarded the democratic safeguards otherwise assured by the APA, it has generally faced little consequences for its actions. For example, tax […]
Pardon my long hiatus from blogging. The reason was a move, from Princeton, NJ where I was working (and will continue to work) on my PhD in financial history, to Philadelphia, PA, where I am now an assistant professor at Wharton/Penn, teaching in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department (those who follow any aspect […]
Here is the July 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 William Funk. I may as well retitle this post the Cass Sunstein Edition, as three of the top five papers are authored by Professor Sunstein. [Aside: When I worked as a […]
The House Financial Services Committee overwhelmingly passed a bill declaring that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (“CFPB”) much-debated guidance document (“Bulletin”) on indirect auto lending to “have no force or effect.” At first glance, this bill would do nothing legally. Under administrative law doctrine, guidance documents like the Bulletin lack legal effect by definition. The […]
In my previous post, I briefly discussed how the IRS has short-circuited the APA’s notice and comment rulemaking procedures to combat tax motivated transactions by private equity firms. I’d like to further flesh out that point here. Given the general readership of this blog, I’ll start by considering a hypothetical environmental statute and then turn […]
In my survey of federal agency rule drafters, I decided to ask a question about the role of presidential signing statements in agency statutory interpretation. In particular, I included a list of nine types of legislative history and asked: “For each of the following, please tell us if the type of legislative history is a (VR) […]
Earlier this week, the IRS issued regulations related to private equity “fee waiver” transactions, which are designed to convert high-taxed ordinary income into low-taxed capital gain. At first, I was pleasantly surprised by the IRS’s method of rulemaking here. Usually, when it issues regulations, the IRS announces that the APA does not apply, and it […]