Differentiating Legislative from Nonlegislative Rules: An Empirical and Qualitative Analysis

The elusive distinction between legislative rules and nonlegislative rules has frustrated courts, motivated voluminous scholarly debate, and ushered in a flood of litigation against administrative agencies. In the absence of U.S. Supreme Court guidance on the proper demarcating line, circuit courts have adopted various tests to ascertain a rule’s proper classification. This Note analyzes all 241 cases in which a circuit court has used one or more of the enunciated tests to differentiate legislative from nonlegislative rules. These opinions come from every one of the thirteen circuits and span the period of the early 1950s through 2018. This Note identifies six different tests that courts have employed in this effort and offers a qualitative and empirical analysis of each. The qualitative analysis explains the underlying premise of the tests, articulates their merits and shortcomings, and considers how courts have applied them to particular disputes. The empirical portion of this Note uses regression analysis to ascertain how using or rejecting one or more of the tests affects a court’s determination of whether the rule is legislative or nonlegislative. This Note classifies the different tests into two categories: public-focused tests and agency-focused tests. These two categories are defined by a principle that permeates administrative law jurisprudence: achieving a proper balance between efficient agency rulemaking and maintaining a proper check against unconstrained agency action. These two categories thus defined, this Note proposes a balanced approach that incorporates elements of both categories to identify and refine the proper test

Pattern formation and nonlocal logistic growth

Logistic growth process with nonlocal interactions is considered in one dimension. Spontaneous breakdown of translational invariance is shown to take place at some parameter region, and the bifurcation regime is identified for short and long range interactions. Domain walls between regions of different order parameter are expressed as soliton solutions of the reduced dynamics for nearest neighbor interactions. The analytic results are confirmed by numerical simulations

WHO EATS WHAT, WHEN, AND FROM WHERE?

The popular impression that over half of our food does not come from a retail food (grocery) store is based on food expenditure data and is misleading. This research set out to learn where people obtain the food they report eating and to determine whether there are significant differences between people who buy most of their food from retail food stores and those who do not. Research on food consumption often focuses on household expenditures at retail food stores and various types of restaurants, but tracking the volume of various types of foods purchased from various retail places is not well established. The Continuing Survey of Food Intake of Individuals survey for 1994 showed that 72 percent of the volume of food consumed was from retail food stores. Age had the largest impact on where people shopped, and when and how many meals they ate. Income and household composition had relatively little impact. Cluster analysis grouped consumers based on where they obtained their food. The largest cluster, nearly half of the individuals, were labeled the Home Cookers. They obtained 93 percent of their food from stores and account for 59 percent of food sold from retail food stores. The High Service cluster is only 10 percent of the sample, but they consumed 50 percent of the food sold in restaurants and only 6 percent of food sold by grocers. Looking at the diets of people in the various clusters reveal that those in the Fast Food clusters ate less fat than the average of the sample while High Service (restaurant) users ate more fat. Home Cookers ate less than the average amount of meat, eggs, and vegetables.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Coherent perfect absorption and reflection in slow-light waveguides

We identify a family of unusual slow-light modes occurring in lossy multi-mode grating waveguides, for which either the forward or backward mode components, or both, become degenerate. In the fully-degenerate case, by varying the wave amplitudes in a uniform input waveguide, one can modulate between coherent perfect absorption (zero reflection) and perfect reflection. The perfectly-absorbed wave has anomalously short absorption length, scaling as the inverse 1/3 power of the absorptivity

The City Suit

This Article addresses the role of local governments in the most American of activities: the lawsuit. During the last few decades, city litigation has grown more proactive, diverse, and prominent. Cities now frequently file lawsuits respecting the most notable issues of the day. Each of these suits involves specific policy concerns peculiar to its subject matter, but as a group—as a legal phenomenon—they all raise common, and disputed, doctrinal questions pertaining to standing, local preemption, res judicata, state immunity, and more. When tackling these diverse doctrinal issues—sounding in both civil procedure and local government law—courts and scholars have failed to establish a coherent and principled approach. Such an approach is attainable, however, once one recognizes that at their core all the disparate doctrines applicable to city suits give voice to the same foundational questions: (1) what is the nature of the city’s right to sue?, and (2) what is that right’s scope? This Article answers these two questions. First, this Article establishes the nature of the city’s right to sue as inherent. For both conceptual and normative reasons, the defining element of cityhood has always been the city’s status as a separate legal entity—its corporate personhood. Corporate personhood, in turn, is manifested through the right to sue and be sued. Cities’ right to sue, therefore, persisted throughout Anglo-American legal history. Contemporary criticisms notwithstanding, city suits are not some newfangled tools of social reform. Second, this Article explains that because the right to sue expresses the city’s separate status, its scope is limited to suits that protect the city’s own separate interests as an entity—not simply the economic, political, or social interests of its residents. A city suit may serve, or even be motivated by, residents’ interests, but it must also further an independent city interest. A city suit solely reflecting residents’ interests undermines the social promise of the city as a distinct and collective body. Contemporary proponents’ enthusiastic embrace of the city suit often misses this limitation. Drawing the connection between the city suit and cityhood, this Article thus answers both the doctrinal and academic challenges of the day. It provides ready solutions to civil procedure and local government law problems that have bogged down courts, while offering a normative theory of the city suit firmly grounded in values associated with the law of the city on the one hand and with access to justice principles on the other. In so doing, it erects potential defenses for the city suit against challenges that might come from a federal judiciary hostile to public-interest litigation

Cost-Benefit of Stockpiling Drugs for Influenza Pandemic

We analyzed strategies for the use of stockpiled antiviral drugs in the context of a future influenza pandemic and estimated cost-benefit ratios. Current stockpiling of oseltamivir appears to be cost-saving to the economy under several treatment strategies, including therapeutic treatment of patients and postexposure prophylactic treatment of patients' close contacts

An Exact Prediction of N=4 SUSYM Theory for String Theory

We propose that the expectation value of a circular BPS-Wilson loop in N=4 SUSYM can be calculated exactly, to all orders in a 1/N expansion and to all orders in g^2 N. Using the AdS/CFT duality, this result yields a prediction of the value of the string amplitude with a circular boundary to all orders in alpha' and to all orders in g_s. We then compare this result with string theory. We find that the gauge theory calculation, for large g^2 N and to all orders in the 1/N^2 expansion does agree with the leading string theory calculation, to all orders in g_s and to lowest order in alpha'. We also find a relation between the expectation value of any closed smooth Wilson loop and the loop related to it by an inversion that takes a point along the loop to infinity, and compare this result, again successfully, with string theory.Comment: LaTeX, 22 pages, 3 figures. Argument corrected and two new sections adde