Earlier this year my Ohio State colleague Peter Shane and I read at our regular “book club” Leah Litman‘s Taking Care of Federal Law, which was published in the Virginia Law Review. This is such a engaging and provocative paper, and I was glad to see Peter review it for Jotwell last month.

Here’s a summary of the paper from the SSRN abstract (the paper is available on here):

This Article argues that Article II should not be understood to require the President alone to execute federal law. Specifically, it argues that Article II does not require the President alone to vindicate the public’s shared interest in the enforcement of federal statutes. Many of the cases addressing this issue are concerned with questions of standing, and specifically whether there are limits on Congress’s power to authorize private citizens to sue to enforce federal law. Standing doctrine requires a litigant to show she has suffered an “injury in fact” before a federal court will hear her claim, and it is derived in part from the Take Care Clause and Article II.

By highlighting the Article II origins of standing doctrine, this Article calls attention to a different set of sources not considered in the literature on standing. And these sources illustrate that one major premise of standing doctrine — that only the President vindicates the public’s shared interest in the enforcement of federal law — is false. In particular, recent preemption cases and several different federal statutes show that non-executive actors routinely execute federal law. These sources therefore provide a new and powerful reason to question both the Court’s premise that the President alone must oversee the public’s shared interest in the enforcement of federal statutes, and its subsequent conclusion that a litigant may not have standing to raise a claim for violation of a federal statute based on a congressionally created private right of action.

Entitled A Federalism Stake in the Heart of the Unitary Executive?, Peter’s Jotwell review is of course also a terrific read. Here’s a taste of the review:

The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia removes from the Supreme Court its most strident modern advocate of the “unitary executive” idea—specifically, the view that Article II’s vesting of law execution power in the President forbids Congress to extend any such authority to individuals or entities not subject to “meaningful presidential control.” Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 922 (1997). I have long argued that this interpretation cannot be reconciled with our constitutional history. But an insightful, tightly argued new article by Leah Litman, a Harvard Law School Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law, demonstrates that this view of the separation of powers can also not be reconciled with the Court’s contemporaneous preemption jurisprudence. Put simply, despite the Court’s occasional pronouncements in separation of powers cases that “Article II requires the President alone to execute federal law,” the “preemption cases suggest that nonexecutive actors may likewise vindicate the public interest in seeing federal law enforced.” (P. 1293-94.)

. . .

Professor Litman’s thorough analysis goes on to catalogue benefits that may flow from state involvement in the execution of federal law, notwithstanding the absence of “meaningful presidential control.” The bottom line seems to be that the Supreme Court regards it as within the discretion of Congress to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of letting states in on federal law execution. If Congress is constitutionally entitled to conclude that state involvement in vindicating the general public interest in law enforcement is a good thing, it is not obvious why reaching the same judgment as to citizen suits is constitutionally problematic. The basis for restrictive standing does not lie in Article II, which does not demand a unitary executive when it comes to taking care of federal law.

Definitely go give the review and the paper a read. Professor Litman just joined the U.C. Irvine law faculty, and I look forward to reading more of her work at the intersection of administrative law and federal courts.

This post is part of the Administrative Law Bridge Series, which highlights terrific scholarship in administrative law and regulation to help bridge the gap between theory and practice in the regulatory state. The Series is further explained here, and all posts in the Series can be found here.