Christopher Walker’s outstanding article on agency interpretive practice got me thinking about how the tax community interprets the tax code differently from courts. I was specifically reminded about the gasps of horror and disgust that I received at a discussion forum during a recent ABA Tax Section Meeting. I had initiated a discussion about the […]
Surely Julia Pierson breathed a sigh of relief as she went to bed last night. She hadn’t won plaudits for her performance on the Hill, but the testimony was over and she could now turn to fixing the problems at the agency responsible for protecting the President. And then she opened the paper this morning […]
On the first of October, a young professor’s fancy turns to the Supreme Court, which will be opening its new term the following week. In that spirit, I want to comment briefly on one of the most important grants of the October 2014 Term in regulatory law: Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association, which, paired with […]
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a terrific resource for current scholarship in a variety of academic fields, and a particularly valuable resource for legal scholarship. It’s also a great way to see other publications and works in progress by a particular scholar, as just about everyone posts their papers on SSRN. So if […]
On August 21–22, 2014, the American Bar Association hosted the Ninth Annual Homeland Security Institute in Washington, D.C. The previous post focused on several major themes of the Institute. This week’s post will focus on issues in immigration law, which was the topic of several panels. These reflections come from the following presentations: America’s Immigration […]
I had hoped to hold off on posting about Fed governance for a bit—I’m close to finishing the first draft of a book on this topic, called The Structure of Federal Reserve Independence, and will be spending a lot of time blogging about its contents once it hits the shelves in the middle of next […]
As Jerry Mashaw has remarked in the pages of the Administrative Law Review (Vol. 57, p. 537), “Inquiry into the empirical realities of agency interpretive practice can provide a crucial window on [agency statutory interpretation] and an essential step in the assessment of the legitimacy of administrative governance.” Yet, to date, little work has been done to […]
The Treasury and IRS have recently suffered some major losses regarding their attempts to regulate tax practitioners. Earlier this year, in Loving v. IRS, the D.C. Circuit invalidated the entire regulatory regime regarding paid tax return preparers. And over the summer, in Ridgley v. Lew, the D.C. District Court invalidated some regulatory restrictions on the […]
My guess is that nearly all law professors are familiar with Jotwell—The Journal of Things We Like (Lots), which is hosted online by the University of Miami Law School under the direction of Michael Froomkin. But I’m also pretty confident that this resource is underutilized—and for the most part unknown—outside of the legal academy. I […]
This week, the Treasury and IRS released a notice addressing so-called corporate inversions, through which U.S. companies essentially shuffle their legal structures to reduce the amount of income subject to U.S. taxes. It’s not surprising that this guidance came out, given that President Obama himself has lambasted the alleged “corporate deserters” who have taken advantage […]
“Either you don’t teach administrative law or I don’t practice administrative law because what you and I do have nothing to do with each other.” — Peter Barton Hutt, Senior Counsel at Covington & Burling, Former FDA Chief Counsel, Harvard Law Lecturer ( Celebrating Peter Barton Hutt’s 20 Years (thus far) at HLS, at 55:50 […]
Registration is open for the Section’s 2014 Administrative Law Conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., October 16 – 17, 2014. Agenda topics include Interpreting the APA – Text and Common Law, Where Regulation and Innovation Converge, and the Developments in Administrative Law, Parts 1 & 2. Visit our website to register. Hope […]
In Jeff’s post last Thursday, he makes the following observation about the continuing role of the nondelegation doctrine in administrative law: Would it make sense, for example, to trade a more vigorously enforceable non-delegation doctrine in exchange for radically lightened notice-and-comment procedural requirements, less monitoring of the use of non-legislative rules, more simplified judicial review […]
This is not (yet) the promised elaboration my thoughts on non-delegation and complexity last week, but rather a clarification and response to Chris’s thoughtful engagement with it. It’s clear that I should have been clearer about what I was suggesting. Chris (reasonably) interprets my post as calling for a jettisoning of the non-delegation doctrine along […]
There’s no getting around it. The Affordable Care Act contains some sloppy drafting, most conspicuously in the section governing the calculation of tax credits. For the most part, that sloppiness reflects the intrinsic difficulty of writing a bill to reform a massive, complex health-care system. Yet the ACA also bears the scars of a brutal […]