As I blogged about in November, this Thursday and Friday in Washington, DC, is the annual ABA Administrative Law Conference. This is an absolute must-attend conference for adlaw nerds, scholars, and practitioners. You can register and get the full schedule here.

On Thursday afternoon from 3:00PM-4:30PM, I’ll be moderating a terrific panel on administrative law exceptionalism. Here’s the description of our panel:

Administrative law exceptionalism—the misperception that a particular regulatory field is so different from the rest of the regulatory state that general administrative law principles do not apply—has plagued the modern regulatory state. We have seen it front in center in a variety of regulatory contexts from tax and financial regulation to patent law and immigration. This panel brings together the leading experts on administrative law exceptionalism from immigration, patent law, and tax—along with a senior attorney from the Justice Department’s Civil Appellate Staff who has briefed and argued many of these issues—to share their insights on the current state of administrative law exceptionalism. The panel will focus both on case studies in these regulatory areas as well as more broadly on the costs and benefits of administrative law exceptionalism.

The panelists are Jill Family (a leading voice on immigration exceptionalism who organized the AALS/JREG symposium on the topic last February), Kristin Hickman (a scholar who has spent nearly a decade calling for the reconsideration of tax exceptionalism), and Melissa Wasserman (a leading voice on IP exceptionalism who organized the terrific Duke Law Journal symposium earlier this year on patent exceptionalism.  Mark Freeman, a senior attorney on the Justice Department’s Civil Appellate Staff, will also participate and reflect on the topic from the perspective of having briefed and argued cases touching on administrative law exceptionalism in a broad variety of regulatory contexts.

I hope you’ll join us for the discussion!