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,...
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...
Conflicts over “sanctuary” cities, minimum wage laws, and gender-neutral bathrooms have brought the problematic landscape of contemporary state preemption of local governance to national attention. This Article contends that more covert, although equally robust, state interference can be found in property, with significant consequences for our understanding of takings law.
Takings jurisprudence looks to the states to mediate most tensions...
Seven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen “independent agencies”: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and only INM. But neither Congress nor the courts have defined INM and hence the extent of agency independence. Stepping into this void, some proponents of presidential power argue...
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,...
Peeking under the tent of our nation’s largest and often most impactful cases reveals that judges often act like ringmasters: They delegate their authority to a wide array of magistrate judges, special masters, and settlement administrators. Some, like the American Bar Association, see this as a plus that promotes efficiency and cost savings. Critics, however, contend that delegating judicial power, especially to private citizens, removes...
A fundamental question for corporate bankruptcy law is why it exists in the first place. Why are there special rules that apply only in financial distress? The conventional law-and-economics answer—known as the Creditors’ Bargain Theory—identifies two core purposes of bankruptcy law: recreating a hypothetical ex ante bargain and respecting creditors’ nonbankruptcy entitlements.
This Article challenges...
The categorical approach, which is a method federal courts use to ‘categorize’ which state law criminal convictions can trigger federal sanctions, is one of the most impactful yet misunderstood legal doctrines in criminal and immigration law. For thousands of criminal offenders, the categorical approach determines whether a previous state law conviction—as defined by the legal elements of the crime—sufficiently matches...
From mandating separate and unequal gravesites, to condoning mutilation after lynchings, to engaging in cover-ups after wrongful police shootings, governmental actors have often degraded dignity in death. This Article offers an account of the constitutional law of the dead and takes aim at a legal rule that purports to categorically exclude the dead from constitutional protection. The rule rests on two faulty premises. The first...
For the last fifty years, Congress has valorized the act of borrowing money as a catalyst for equality, embracing the proposition that equality can be bought with a loan. In a series of bedrock statutes aimed at democratizing access to loans and purchase money for marginalized groups, Congress has evinced a “borrowing-as-equality” policy that has largely focused on the capacity of “credit,” while acoustically separating...