\u3ci\u3eChevron\u3c/i\u3e Flip-Flops of a Different Sort - Understanding the Shifting Politics of Deference

Like vaccinations, voter fraud, guns, taking a knee, and, well, everything, views on Chevron deference have become not just ideologically tinged but ideologically determined. Progressives are Chevron enthusiasts; conservatives are Chevron skeptics. Chevron is under siege, and the battle lines are familiar. Yet, on its face, Chevron is politically neutral. It increases agency power at the expense of judicial power; whether that is politically helpful depends on whether your team controls the White House or if it controls the courts. Furthermore, the current ideological array has not always been the case. When Chevron was decided, the enthusiasts were on the right and the skeptics on the left. So what is going on

Defending Universal Vacatur - Nationwide Injunctions for Administrative Law

The nationwide injunction has seized the imagination of courts and law professors in recent years. Not surprisingly, JOTWELL’s pages screens have given it extensive attention. Recent jots have described important work by Samuel Bray (twice), Amanda Frost (also twice), Russell Weaver, and Alan Trammell that attacks, defends, or theorizes nationwide (or “universal”) injunctions. Jack Beermann, in praising Bray and Frost, did have one complaint: “As an administrative law nut, I wish they both grappled more with the meaning of the APA’s instruction that reviewing courts should ‘hold unlawful and set aside’ unlawful agency action.” Mila Sohoni has now filled that void. Sohoni convincingly shows that there just can be no question that in the Administrative Procedure Act Congress authorized—indeed, indicated a preference for and established a presumption in favor of—nationwide relief when a court finds a regulation defective. When APA § 706(2) authorizes a reviewing court to “set aside” an agency rule, it means exactly that

Breaking News: New Form of Superior Agency Guidance Discovered Hiding in Plain Sight

For decades, controversy has brewed over agency (ab)use of and (over)reliance on guidance documents. On one account, agencies turn to guidance in an end run around notice-and-comment requirements, producing de facto legislative rules without either public input or, at least in some cases, judicial scrutiny. On another, guidance documents are good government in action, a helpful and illuminating benefit. In Preambles as Guidance, Kevin Stack does not take sides in this debate. But he does helpfully remind us that there is one type of guidance that (a) is not subject to the standard critique and (b) is often not appreciated as guidance at all. This overlooked creature, hiding in plain sight, is the preamble that accompanies every final rule

Political Oversight of Agency Decisionmaking

Administrative agencies are often said to possess (a) expertise and (b) accountability. These are the attributes that Justice Stevens relied on in Chevron, for example, to justify judicial deference to agency “interpretation” that is really policymaking. Both of these admirable characteristics are exaggerated, but neither is mythical. What is to be done, however, when they conflict

Gandhis of the Deep State

It is a truism that agency organizational charts are at least in part aspirational or idealized. The political appointees at the top lack perfect control over the career employees beneath them in the hierarchy. When all are rowing in the same direction, such agency costs matter little and may go unnoticed. But suppose they are not. What if they barely perceive themselves as in the same boat

Institutional Design by Default

The central concern of administrative law is how to control agency discretion. Agencies are handed enormous authority, and administrative law consists primarily – indeed, almost exclusively – of a set of doctrines designed to inform, curb, or enable other actors to oversee discretionary agency actions. Administrative law is preoccupied with establishing procedures to prevent agency abuse and designing oversight by non-agency players – the President, Congress, private stakeholders, and, most obviously, the judiciary. All the core doctrines of administrative law are generally understood as implementing basic decisions regarding institutional choice: who does what? How should power be divided up amongst these institutions

Using Social Media in Rulemaking: Possibilities and Barriers

“Web 2.0” is characterized by interaction, collaboration, non-static web sites, use of social media, and creation of user-generated content. In theory, these Web 2.0 tools can be harnessed not only in the private sphere but as tools for an e-topia of citizen engagement and participatory democracy. Notice-and-comment rulemaking is the pre-digital government process that most approached (while still falling far short of) the e-topian vision of public participation in deliberative governance. The notice-and-comment process for federal agency rulemaking has now changed from a paper process to an electronic one. Expectations for this switch were high; many anticipated a revolution that would make rulemaking not just more efficient, but also more broadly participatory, democratic, and dialogic. In the event, the move online has not produced a fundamental shift in the nature of notice-and-comment rulemaking. At the same time, the online world in general has come to be increasingly characterized by participatory and dialogic activities, with a move from static, text-based websites to dynamic, multi-media platforms with large amounts of user-generated content. This shift has not left agencies untouched. To the contrary, agencies at all levels of government have embraced social media – by late 2013 there were over 1000 registered federal agency twitter feeds and over 1000 registered federal agency Facebook pages, for example – but these have been used much more as tools for broadcasting the agency’s message than for dialogue or obtaining input. All of which invites the questions whether agencies could or should directly rely on social media in the rulemaking process. This study reviews how federal agencies have been using social media to date and considers the practical and legal barriers to using social media in rulemaking, not just to raise the visibility of rulemakings, which is certainly happening, but to gather relevant input and help formulate the content of rules. The study was undertaken for the Administrative Conference of the United States and is the basis for a set of recommendations adopted by ACUS in December 2013. Those recommendations overlap with but are not identical to the recommendations set out herein

New Wine, Old Bottles, and a Do-Nothing Congress

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was adopted to protect against hazards to and interference with navigation. It prohibited “creation of any obstruction to the navigable capacity of any of the waters of the United States” or altering or filling navigable waters (§10) and also made it unlawful “to throw, discharge, or deposit . . . any refuse matter” into navigable waters “whereby navigation shall or may be impeded or obstructed,” although the Corps of Engineers could permit such a discharge if “anchorage and navigation will not be injured thereby” (§13). For two-thirds of a century, those provisions operated as one would expect. Then came the modern environmental movement, and in short order the courts and the executive branch turned these provisions about obstruction to navigation into a water-pollution control regime. As President Nixon drily put it in issuing an executive order that created a sweeping new pollution permit program under §13, the Act’s “potential for water pollution control has only recently been recognized.” Richard Nixon, Statement on Signing Executive Order Establishing a Water Quality Enforcement Program (Dec. 23, 1970)

Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friends - Levin on the Guidance Exception

The late, great Kenneth Culp Davis was known for many things, but humility was not among them. He knew the answers; he knew them better than did the Supreme Court; and he knew that he knew them. So it is remarkable that there was a problem in administrative law he found “baffling.” That was the distinction between legislative rules, interpretive rules, and statements of policy