Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘administrative law’

Nominee Neil Gorsuch: no rubber stamp for government

Radley Balko urges civil libertarians, including those on the liberal side, to feel a sense of relief at the selection of Neil Gorsuch: “Trump has nominated a thoughtful judge who seems as likely to challenge inevitable future Trump power grabs as any justice on the court.” [Washington Post] Paul Karlsgodt of Class Action Blawg, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, says the high esteem for Neil Gorsuch in the Denver legal community cuts across ideological lines. As Chevron deference for the first time emerges as a popular national issue, here’s the point to keep in mind: “Gorsuch has favored an approach to administrative law that would limit President Donald Trump’s discretion and power.” [Jeffrey Pojanowski, CNN] On Gorsuch’s already-famous ruling in the burping-student case: “That does not sound like a judge who bends over backward to side with the government.” [Jacob Sullum] And Hilaire Belloc: “Always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse.”.

SCOTUSBlog assembles a long list of reactions from left, right, and other places.

And the Cato podcast series with Caleb Brown has a double entry, the first interview being with Ilya Shapiro:

and the second with Andrew Grossman:

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President Trump: “No federal funds” for Berkeley?

A President might not find it simple or straightforward to use direct executive orders to cut off funds to universities that tolerate disruption of speech or exclude speakers based on the content of their speech. But the power that the Department of Education and allied agencies have gathered to themselves over university life has steadily mounted, often against little resistance from the universities themselves, as in the Title IX instance. That gives an administration plenty of handles to make its will known, a process previewed in October, as to Trump, in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece. It quotes Alexander Holt, an education-policy analyst at New America, saying: “I could see a Trump administration going crazy on these ‘Dear Colleague’ letters.”

Two years ago I cited several examples of rule by Dear Colleague letter, as I called it, in this area. (More here.) And I noted one big problem with invoking judicial oversight to check the federal government’s power:

It may be difficult to persuade a college to serve as a test case, given the annihilating possibility of a federal funds cutoff as the penalty of its presumption.

More: cross-posted, slightly expanded, at Cato at Liberty. And FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has now weighed in on last night’s events at Berkeley surrounding an invited speech by Milo Yiannopoulos. On the federal funding issue, FIRE states its view as follows:

It is true that, under current law, public universities that enforce blatantly unconstitutional speech codes and private universities that violate their own promises of free speech do not face the same potential loss of federal funding for censoring campus speech that they do for violating other federal civil rights laws and regulations. However, FIRE has so far seen no evidence that Berkeley as an institution made any effort to silence Yiannopoulos.

Those who engage in violent and/or destructive protests are ultimately responsible for their unlawful behavior and may be subject to arrest and prosecution by law enforcement. To punish an educational institution for the criminal behavior of those not under its control and in contravention of its policies, whether through the loss of federal funds or through any other means, would be deeply inappropriate and most likely unlawful.

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February 2 roundup

  • “Louisiana Police Chief: Resisting Arrest is Now a Hate Crime Under State Law” [C.J. Ciamarella, earlier on so-called Blue Lives Matter laws here, here, etc.]
  • Agency interpretive letters are the wrong way to enact new federal law [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald on Cato amicus in school bathroom case, Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.]
  • “Thousands of business threatened by ADA lawsuits” [Justin Boggs, Scripps/NBC26]
  • “Reforming The Administrative State — And Reining It In” Hoover Institution panel with Adam White, Oren Cass, and Kevin Kosar, moderated by Yuval Levin [video, related Adam White paper, “Reforming Administrative Law to Reflect Administrative Reality”].
  • New Hampshire: “Wal-Mart told to pay pharmacist $16 million for gender bias” [Reuters]
  • Congress seldom has acted as if it believed strongly in D.C. home rule and it’s unlikely to start now [Ryan McDermott, Washington Times, thanks for quotes]

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January 4 roundup

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A federal school bathroom policy? Not so fast

The Obama administration has ambitiously asserted, as an application of Title IX, that schools nationwide must make available to transgender students the general bathroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity. To resolve a case now up for Supreme Court review, it is not necessary to reach the merits of this policy; the promulgation of the new policy by guidance letter, without advance notice, chance for public comment and other protections for regulated parties, is enough of a defect to strike it down. [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald on Cato Institute amicus brief, with law professors Jonathan Adler, Richard Epstein, and Michael McConnell, supporting certiorari review in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.]

[The Education Department] seeks to change federal law not through notice-and-comment rulemaking as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, but through an informal, unpublished letter written by a low-level bureaucrat. …We call on the Court to take this opportunity to overrule Auer and declare that the judiciary will no longer blindly accept self-serving agency interpretations, but make their own independent determinations based on a searching and reasoned reading of the regulations at issue. Should the Court choose not to overrule Auer, we suggest that—at minimum—it hold that only agency interpretations that have received the public scrutiny of notice-and-comment rulemaking merit judicial deference.

More on Auer deference here, etc.

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Write an ambiguous rule — then pounce

Government agencies can get an unfair edge in disputes with the regulated public if they can write ambiguity into their rules, develop interpretations that open up further ambiguities to suit their needs, and then when a dispute arises gain deference from courts on these doubtful interpretations-piled-upon-interpretations. In Foster v. Vilsack, the issue was whether a “prairie pothole” depression on a South Dakota farm should be deemed a federally protected wetland, denying the Fosters productive use of the land; the U.S. Department of Agriculture adopted what seemed a strained interpretation enabling it to so designate the land, and the Eighth Circuit deferred to it.

The decision actually afforded the agency “second-level” Auer deference, deferring to an interpretation of a vaguely written agency circular that interprets a vague regulation that in turn interprets a vague statute–all to get to a definition of “local area” that is nothing close to a natural and reasonable interpretation of that term.

Cato has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the farm family’s request for certiorari, urging the Supreme Court to revisit the Auer doctrine in administrative law at least to prevent its irrational extension:

Second-level Auer deference also undermines the rule of lenity — a traditional rule of interpretation stating that ambiguity in criminal statutes must be resolved in favor of the defendant — even more than first-level Auer deference already does. It effectively allows agencies to create new crimes (again without notice to the public) by doing as little as reinterpreting a footnote in a memo. Cato urges the Supreme Court take the case so that it may rein in the expansion of Auer deference and make it clear to administrative agencies that they cannot avoid judicial review by refusing to promulgate clear, unambiguous regulations.

[Trevor Burrus and David McDonald; more on Auer deference]

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FIRE backs suit over Dear Colleague letter

With help from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a former University of Virginia law student has sued the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights arguing that it violated the law in its notorious 2011 Dear Colleague letter requiring many campuses to roll back the procedural rights of students accused of sexual assault. The John Doe complainant argues that the department should at a minimum have put the policy shifts proclaimed in the letter through the notice-and-comment process prescribed for rulemaking, rather than in effect proclaiming them by decree through subregulatory guidance. The letter affected the student’s own case, he argues, because of comments from the retired judge deciding the case that she viewed the evidence as falling short of a clear and convincing threshold, the standard formerly in use, and ruled against him only because the university had complied with federal guidance by dropping its standard to preponderance of the evidence. [Susan Svrluga, Washington Post; Hans Bader, CEI]

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“Administrative Law Judges Are Unconstitutional”

Administrative law judges are executive-branch as distinct from judicial officers, yet the President has no power to remove them; at the Securities and Exchange Commission and many other federal agencies, they are themselves employed by the agency on whose enforcement cases they must render quasi-judicial rulings. In recent years federal judges have expressed unease about whether assigning ALJs this particular combination of adjudicatory powers and institutional affiliations is entirely consistent with the U.S. Constitution, and now a Cato Institute amicus brief, in the D.C. Circuit case of Timbervest LLC v. Securities and Exchange Commission, urges courts to take the next logical step and rule that it is not. [Ilya Shapiro and Thaya Brook Knight; earlier here, here, here here, etc.]

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April 20 roundup

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Scalia’s change of mind on agency deference

Initially, Justice Antonin Scalia supported the doctrine (Auer/Seminole Rock) by which courts defer to administrative agencies in interpreting the scope of their regulations. Toward the end of his life, however, he changed his mind. And in that change lies a lesson about the tension between the dangers of arbitrariness and abdication in the judiciary, and how the Constitution goes about addressing that tension [Evan Bernick; earlier]

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