Executive Branch

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Essay
Introduction
Deborah Malamud
Kenyon College, B.A. 2017; The University of Chicago Law School, J.D. 2021.

She thanks the authors for their contributions to the series.

Speaking on Chevron deference at Duke University School of Law in 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia told the audience to “lean back, clutch the sides of your chairs, and steel yourselves for a pretty dull lecture.” Perhaps he would have withheld his cynicism if he could have seen the Supreme Court’s administrative-law rulings in the past year.

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Essay
Of Angels, Pins, and For-Cause Removal: A Requiem for the Passive Virtues
Jerry L. Mashaw
Jerry L. Mashaw is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer at the Yale Law School.

This Essay concerns a constitutional puzzle, the puzzle of for-cause removal. For a century the Supreme Court has been attempting to answer a simple question: when is it constitutional for Congress to provide that an agency head or lower official can be removed only for cause?

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Essay
Conservative Minimalism and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Jonathan H. Adler
Jonathan H. Adler is the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and the Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Chief Justice John Roberts mystified and frustrated court watchers with his opinions in the closing weeks of the Supreme Court’s October 2019 term.

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Essay
Separation-of-Powers Faux Pas: The McGahn Litigation and Congress’s Efforts to Use the Courts to Resolve Interbranch Information Disputes
Reid Coleman
Rice University, B.A. 2017; Special Assistant to the White House Counsel, 2017–2018; J.D. Candidate, Class of 2021, The University of Texas School of Law.

For helpful commentary and feedback, the author thanks Hugh Brady, Dan Epstein, Matthew Reade, and The University of Chicago Law Review. The author would also like to thank Don McGahn and Annie Donaldson for their role in an incredibly formative year at the White House. This Essay reflects the author’s views only.

After former White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn refused to comply with a congressional subpoena, the U.S. House of Representatives initiated a federal lawsuit.