administrative law

Is Bureaucratic Leadership an Oxymoron?

History shows that that those much-maligned bureaucrats are sometimes the unsung heroes of policy improvement.

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U.S. Supreme Court Justices Are on USEPA’s Case

You can’t blame the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of late for feeling it’s under siege. All of the current Republican presidential candidates are regularly excoriating EPA on the campaign trail, and Congress has conducted oversight hearings and threatened all sorts of legislative action designed to clip EPA’s regulatory wings. Now the U.S. Supreme Court appears …

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Update on Mountaintop Removal: Gov. Manchin Sues EPA

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin announced Tuesday that West Virginia is filing suit to, as the Governor put it, stop EPA’s “attempts to destroy the coal-mining industry and our way of life.”  The Charleston Gazette has a good summary of the suit.  The suit seeks to invalidate EPA’s recent review of Clean Water Act permits …

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(Vermont) Yankee Go Home!

You may recall the Supreme Court’s decision in the Vermont Yankee case.  It was a major administrartive law decision.  Prior to Vermont Yankee, the D.C. Circuit and some other courts had been experimenting with an approach to judicial review which focused on helping to improve agency procedures, rather than reviewing the substance of the agency’s …

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Climate Change versus the Benzene Case

The Benzene Case — more properly, Industrial Union Dept. v. American Petroleum Inst. — is almost thirty years old, but is still the Supreme Court’s most important statement on risk regulation.  After considering mountains of evidence, OSHA issued a rule restricting benzene in the workplace.  Benzene was known to be a carcinogen; the evidence was …

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Herein of Regulatory “Czars”

Some conservatives like Glenn Beck are now raising alarms about the power of “czars” within the Obama White House.   Although the rhetoric is ridiculous, there is a serious question here.  A long-term trend has been for Presidents to exert more centralized control over the bureaucracy, and as a practical matter that control has to be …

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New and Noteworthy from the Ecology Law Quarterly

The latest issue of ELQ — full content available free here — is  centered on two broad themes: 1)  learning from other states, countries and international experiences and 2) the failures of administrative law as an environmental management tool. The issue includes the following articles: * The Transformation of Modern Administrative Law: Changing Administrations and …

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Ruling by Justice Scalia Makes it Easier to Repeal Bush-Era Rules

Ironically, an opinion by Justice Scalia will indirectly help the Obama Administration repeal Bush-era environmental rules.

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