Legislation

Often, private organizations composed of subject matter experts draft technical standards that describe safety recommendations or “best practices” for certain industries. Legislators and regulators on the federal, state, and local levels will, on occasion, provide legal weight to these privately created standards by incorporating them by reference into the law. Following these standards thus becomes mandatory, but the American people frequently...

Appropriations lie at the core of the administrative state and are be­com­ing increasingly important as deep partisan divides have stymied sub­stan­tive legislation. Both Congress and the President exploit appropria­tions to control government and advance their policy agendas, with the border wall battle being just one of several recent high-profile examples. Yet in public law doctrine, appropriations are ignored, pulled out for spe­cial...

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined “equity” as the pro­cess that intervenes when law fails because of its generality. Equity is largely assumed to be the province of courts and framed primarily as the domain of judges: Should the court apply a general law when its appli­cation results in unforeseen or unfortunate consequences? But equity operates outside the courts also. Within legislatures and administrative agencies,...