Administrative agencies, the fourth branch of government, famously blend the functions of the other three. Agencies write rules, adjudicate their meaning, and penalize violations. Several recent high-profile agency penalties have attracted attention to this understudied area of administrative law. In 2010 alone, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration imposed a… Read More »
I. Introduction
Obscure constitutional provisions rarely give rise to serious questions: that is why they are obscure. Yet sometimes provisions spring quickly from obscurity to relevance. Never in the nation’s history has the scope and meaning of Congress’s power to “Define and Punish . . . Offenses Against the Law… Read More »
Introduction
In Samantar v. Yousuf, the Supreme Court held that the common law, not the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), governs the immunity of current and former foreign officials from legal proceedings in U.S. courts. Lower courts must now identify and apply these “common law” rules. In so doing, they must determine whether,… Read More »
The role of international and transnational law in U.S. courts is one of the most hotly contested debates in legal scholarship. From the question of the use of comparative legal materials by the Supreme Court, to the question of what effect, if any, judgments of international tribunals such as the… Read More »
What will Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission mean for labor unions? There are at least two ways to answer that question: first, in terms of its effect on election spending by labor unions; and second, in terms of its precedential value in future cases regarding the scope of labor… Read More »
As generations of law students have learned, Lucy v. Zehmer is a tale of two “doggoned drunks” drinking liquor and bantering over the sale of a farm the weekend before Christmas in 1952. Adrian Hardy Zehmer, allegedly drunk and joking, scribbled a contract for the sale of his farm on… Read More »
Is international law law? Though leading scholars have said that it is “futile” whether international law is law in fact matters a great deal. Most fundamentally, it matters from the moral point of view. Law’s moral import follows from a basic truth accepted by… Read More »
Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, “The reason the public thinks so much of the Justices of the Supreme Court is that they are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.” It is remarkable to think that each year, each justice is responsible for evaluating over seven… Read More »
Legal scholarship has been under sharp attack, particularly when it comes to the role some believe it should play in support of the legal profession. In recent remarks, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that he does not pay much attention to it, reportedly stating that legal scholarship is not “particularly… Read More »
The Solicitor General’s recent brief to the Supreme Court arguing for the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) confidently concludes that the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause confers broad authority upon Congress to enact the so-called “individual mandate” (or “minimum coverage provision”). According to the Solicitor… Read More »