Many unresolved questions weigh heavily on the debate over Auer deference, including: Is Auer deference “stronger” than Chevron deference? How varied are the procedural formats associated with regulatory interpretations that are reviewed under Auer? What would be the administrative burden of reforming Auer by adding a “Step Zero”? In order to provide empirical answers to […]
Seminole Rock (or Auer) deference prompts many disagreements. Everyone agrees, however, that Seminole Rock has captured the attention of scholars, policymakers, and the judiciary. That is why we at Notice & Comment have decided that the time has come to collect thoughts regarding different aspects of Seminole Rock. Indeed, over the next two weeks, we […]
Steeped in World War II and with inflation growing, the United States sought to avoid repeating the financial mistakes of the first World War and turned for one of the few times in its history to price controls. On the heels of the passage of the Emergency Price Control Act, the Office of Price Administration […]
In the summer of 1942, Professor Henry Hart, then ten years into his career as a law professor, temporarily left the Harvard Law faculty to become an associate general counsel at the Office of Price Administration, an agency responsible for setting prices throughout the World War II-economy. Just under three years later, Hart argued the […]
Earlier this month we hosted a terrific online symposium reviewing my co-blogger Peter Conti-Brown’s important new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve, which was recently published by the Princeton University Press. The contributions to the symposium were diverse and thought-provoking. For ease of reference, I thought I’d include links to all of […]
What a pleasure it has been to read these reviews. As I set out to write The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve , this very audience—serious scholars and practitioners of administrative law who had thought hard about institutional design in other contexts besides the Fed—weighed heavily as one of the primary groups of […]
Readers are hard to please. It is bad enough that we criticize books that we could not even begin to write. But even worse, when an author has penned something that we like, all too often our response is not “thank you” but rather “more please”—and sometimes we don’t say “please.” I confess that after […]
When an independent agency is created, from whom does it gain independence – the President, Congress, or the people? Maybe the better question is whether it is really independent at all. One thing in particular that caught my eye is Peter Conti-Brown’s focus in Part III on the independence of the Federal Reserve Board (Fed) […]
I join my fellow colleagues in praising Peter Conti-Brown’s The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. The book provides an insightful history of the Federal Reserve since its 1913 inception and is a powerful account of the extent to which “personnel is policy.” In particular, I note his nuanced understanding of “agency independence” as […]
A sincere thank you to Peter Conti-Brown for his efforts to reach the public in his book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve. First, I begin by revealing that my practice is far removed geographically and figuratively from those who ponder the rationale for the power and independence of the Federal Reserve. My […]
Administrative law doctrine and scholarship has traditionally treated agencies as unitary entities and focused upon the proper allocation of authority among agencies, the President, Congress, and the courts. Recently, however, scholars have begun to unlock the “black box” of agency design to identify and evaluate the ways in which administrative law rules allocate decisionmaking authority […]
Peter Conti-Brown’s terrific study of the Federal Reserve arrives amid a small boomlet—I won’t say “bubble”—of new books on our central bank: Roger Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve; former Chairman Bernanke’s memoir, The Courage to Act; similar memoirs by former Chairman Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Geithner; Philip Wallach’s […]
My thanks to Chris Walker for organizing this symposium and inviting me to participate. It’s a pleasure to be involved and an honor to be among such an impressive line-up of scholars and experts. Like yesterday morning’s contributor, Sam Halabi, the Federal Reserve System is not my area of expertise, but I very much enjoyed […]
There is a rumor out there (which may have just started with this post) that one out of every thirteen copies of Peter Conti-Brown’s new book The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve includes a chapter exploring how over the last century the Freemasons have influenced and in some respect controlled the form and […]
Let me begin by echoing Daniel’s thanks to Chris, the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment team, and Peter for the opportunity to reach outside my scholarly comfort zone and hopefully play a useful role in illuminating the importance of Peter’s book not only for scholars of the Federal Reserve system but the legal […]