Administrative Law

This Essay argues for the development of more robust—and balanced—law that focuses not only on the risks, but also the potential, that AI brings. In turn, it argues that there is a need to develop a framework for laws and policies that incentivize and, at times, mandate transitions to AI-based automation. Automation rights—the right to demand and the duty to deploy AI-based technology when it outperforms human-based action—should become part of the legal landscape. A rational analysis of the costs and benefits of AI deployment would suggest that certain high-stakes circumstances compel automation because of the high costs and risks of not adopting the best available technologies. Inevitably, the rapid advancements in machine learning will mean that law soon must embrace AI; accelerate deployment; and, under certain circumstances, prohibit human intervention as a matter of fairness, welfare, and justice.

This Essay concerns the evolving relationship between the economy and the methods society deployed to legitimate, control, and channel economic behavior, especially religion and law. Using the recently published work of three eminent academics—Benjamin Friedman, Jonathan Levy, and William Novak—it addresses first the changes in thought necessary to legitimate acquisitive economic behavior and the consequent centering of law as the secular replacement for religion. As capitalism fostered wider markets, as its evolution embodied industrialism and commercialism, it created problems that the regulatory state could not handle. In America, the transition from regulatory to administrative state was complicated by its federal structure and background democratic egalitarian yearnings. Friedman, Levy, and Novak illustrate and elucidate aspects of that evolution. This Essay suggests that reading them together explains more than each separately, and ends by noting how the tensions they explain usefully add to our understanding of American law, and, coincidentally, the potentially transformational administrative law decisions of the Supreme Court in the 2023–2024 term.

Courts, litigants, and scholars should not be confused by the ongoing debate about nationwide or so-called “universal” injunctions: the proper scope of remedies under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and other statutes providing for judicial review of agency action is “erasure.” This Article aims to save scholars’ recent progress in showing the legality of stays and vacatur under the APA from muddled thinking that conflates these forms of relief with other universal remedies that face growing criticism.

How often do Supreme Court opinions include what might be called “lobbying language,” which endorses a policy position while calling for another government entity to realize it? Reviewing relevant cases, this Essay finds that the sample set includes at least a dozen examples of lobbying language. As it turns out, lobbying is not so unusual for the Supreme Court.

This case raises some difficult theoretical questions about what harms insider trading laws are supposed to prevent and what benefits they are supposed to provide to the marketplace.

From 2017 to 2019, two U.S. technology giants, Apple and Qualcomm, engaged in a war of patent suits across the world. One battle took place at the International Trade Commission (ITC), a federal agency that prevents patent-infringing products from entering the United States.

Presidents have increasingly turned to the administrative state to implement their political agendas.

Although Congress has so far declined to enact any immunity protection specifically targeted at COVID-19 claims, that has not stopped the Executive Branch from responding to the pandemic with immunity measures.

The Supreme Court’s changing composition and, relatedly, its increasing skepticism for the current structure and pervasiveness of the administrative state have given rise to increased constitutional challenges to agency actions that seem increasingly likely to be successful.

Perhaps no problem has caused more consternation and outright confusion in administrative law circles than the Ad-ministrative Procedure Act’s (APA) exemptions to notice-and-comment rulemaking, the process by which agencies present proposed rules to the public for feedback before issuing them in final form.