National security review of corporate transactions has long been a relatively sleepy corner of regulatory policy. But as governments merge economic and national security, national security reviews are expanding in frequency and scope, causing numerous deals to be renegotiated or even blocked. This expansion of national security’s impact on corporate transactions—which this Essay calls “national security creep”—raises theoretical questions...
Administrative Law
This Essay responds to the wide range of commentary on Delegation at the Founding, published previously in the Columbia Law Review. The critics’ arguments deserve thoughtful consideration and a careful response. We’re happy to supply both. As a matter of eighteenth-century legal and political theory, “rulemaking” could not be neatly described as either legislative or executive based on analysis of its scope, subject, or substantive...
This Article uncovers the intellectual foundations of presidential administration and—on the basis of original archival research and new contextualization—grounds its legitimacy in the fight against fascism. It shows how the architects of presidential control of the administrative state reconciled a strong executive with democratic norms by embracing separation of powers in order to make the government responsible and antifascist. It then draws...
After President Trump declared a national emergency and diverted funds to build a wall on the southern border, several litigants challenged his action as ultra vires, or beyond his constitutional and statutory authority. The litigants asserted abstract equitable rights of action, implied in federal courts’ equitable powers. The Supreme Court has left unclear, however, whether or not such an implied equitable action for statutory...
Despite deportation’s devastating effects, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies deportation as the penalty for nearly every immigration law violation. Critics have regularly decried the INA’s lack of proportionality, contending that the penalty often does not fit the offense. The immigration bureaucracy’s implementation of the INA, however, involves a spectrum of penalties short of deportation. Using tools such as administrative...
Agency delay has become a chronic issue in administrative law. As Congress increasingly relies on reducing appropriations to implement its agenda, agencies have shouldered the conflicting burdens of meeting preexisting statutory deadlines for agency action, while also adhering to their newly reduced budgets. The result has been delayed agency action across a broad range of policy areas, such as environmental protection, health care, and economic...
Commentators and policymakers frequently propose new government agencies in response to novel or intractable problems. New agencies can refocus public attention on the problems they regulate. They can attract new talent and bypass calcified or captured channels. But they are also costly, and there is no guarantee that they will be more successful than their predecessors.
This Article examines agency genesis at the state level. In the process,...
In the 1951 case United States ex rel. Touhy v. Ragen, the Supreme Court determined that courts can’t hold federal agency officials in contempt for refusing to comply with nonparty subpoenas if they do so pursuant to valid agency regulations. Though the Court suggested that litigants could still challenge these noncompliance decisions, it didn’t flesh out what that process would look like. Following Touhy, federal...
This Article refutes the claim that the Constitution was originally understood to contain a nondelegation doctrine. The Founding generation didn’t share anything remotely approaching a belief that the constitutional settlement imposed restrictions on the delegation of legislative power—let alone by empowering the judiciary to police legalized...
Over the coming decades, experts estimate that twenty-five percent of all plant and animal species may go extinct. Climate change directly contributes to species extinction through ecosystem shift, and accelerates other drivers of extinction such as destruction of habitat and pollution. The Endangered Species Act is the only legal tool in the United States to directly protect against the threat of species extinction, and critical...