On May 4, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association (and a companion case). The case raises the question whether FERC exceeded its authority in issuing a regulation that gives retail energy customers incentives to reduce electricity consumption. The Federal Power Act (“FPA”) grants FERC the power to regulate the […]

The Government is likely to prevail in King v. Burwell if its interpretation of the Affordable Care Act receives Chevron deference. This raises an important question: what influences when Supreme Court justices grant Chevron deference to agencies? Prof. Bill Eskridge and I examined this question in a paper that examined all Supreme Court cases from […]

Microsoft Corp. has recently challenged the enforcement of IRS summons regarding some of its international tax planning, arguing that the IRS has flouted the law by allowing Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to participate in an audit of the company. The dispute raises many fundamental questions that a district court has been asked to answer. […]

As the subheader of the blog now reads and as TaxProf Blog’s Paul Caron announced earlier today, the Yale JREG editors and regular bloggers have decided to join the Law Professor Blogs Network to fill the administrative law void in the network. While I don’t anticipate this changing the substance here, we’re excited about joining the network and […]

So would hold Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in a case challenging the constitutionality of the institutional design of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Kavanaugh has written some of the most provocative concurring and dissenting opinions about the constitutional limits and permissions of institutional design, including […]

Yesterday saw a fight over the Department of Defense’s proposed rule that would protect military families from predatory lending. The proposed regulation seeks to implement the Military Lending Act, which caps interest rates on loans to service members, by closing loopholes that have allow finance companies to continue offering high-interest loans to enlisted personnel. A […]

In non-net neutrality telecom news, last week saw the announcement that Comcast has ended its $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable. The announcement came after government officials met with Comcast executives and expressed their opposition to the merger. For their part, FCC staff members were reportedly prepared to refer the merger to an FCC […]

My last several posts dealt with the complicated relationship between the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone and the International Health Regulations that were adopted in 2005 (with an effective date in 2007) in order to address exactly such a threat. The overwhelming consensus is that they failed to effectively manage the outbreak […]

On Monday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins to resolve a basic question of Article III standing: Does a person has standing to sue to seek redress for the violation of a right, even if he did not suffer any other injury from the rights violation? This is the second time […]

If the government loses in King v. Burwell, Congress will come under intense pressure to restore insurance subsidies in the 34 states that refused to set up their own exchanges. Anticipating the tricky post-King politics, Senate Republicans appear to have coalesced around a bill crafted by Senator Johnson that would extend subsidies through 2017 to […]

On Monday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins to resolve a basic question of Article III standing: Does a person has standing to sue to seek redress for the violation of a right, even if he did not suffer any other injury from the rights violation? This is the second time […]

Now that the FCC’s Open Internet/Title II Reclassification Order has finally arrived (along with the inevitable lawsuits), I thought I would do a brief addendum to my prior post on the various legal challenges confronting the FCC’s plan. (For Gus Hurwitz’s response to that post, and my reply, see here and here.) One thing my prior […]

In a prior post, I discussed how I thought the use of the phrase “IRS Code,” as opposed to “Internal Revenue Code,” reflected some sloppiness on the part of the speaker, but that the phrasing was not inherently misleading. Here, I want to discuss whether another phrase that triples the blood pressure of the typical […]