Articles

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association, which holds that an executive agency is not required to provide public notice or consider comments when it changes a formal interpretation of its own regulations. The unanimous decision is rather uneventful, despite the fact that it limits publi ...

Ignorance of the law is no excuse; especially if you wrote the law. Federal regulations have become so complicated and abundant that even the agencies who write them don’t grasp them. Last week, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals chided a federal agency for ignorance regarding its own laws. … ...

Today, the Federalist Society Blog shared a post that Larry Salzman and I co-authored regarding how some judges are keeping administrative agencies accountable to average Americans. In the post, we explain that judges are scrutinizing agencies’ decisions more closely, and are requiring them to support their determinations with actual facts an ...

I will be speaking tomorrow at 10:45 am Pacific in the Seminar Center at World Ag Expo in Tulare, California. I will be joined by PLF client John Duarte, and we will be providing an overview of Duarte Nursery v. Corps of Engineers and answering questions on the case. This one abusive federal prosecution sums … ...

Can federal agencies make up whatever policies they like unless Congress tells them not to? PLF answered an emphatic “no” in an amicus brief filed today to support a petition to the Supreme Court. In National Restaurant Assocation v. Department of Labor, courts allowed the Department to expand its power beyond limits set by Congress. & ...

A few weeks ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, noted constitutional scholar and Dean of Law at UC Irvine, published an op ed in the San Francisco Daily Journal arguing that Senate Democrats should filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States. Dean Chemerinsky’s piece was long on hyperbole and short on … ...

Our Congressional Review Act project (have you seen the latest at RedTapeRollback.com? Why not?) is starting to ruffle the right feathers: progressive media sites and activists have noticed that their pet regulatory excesses, especially underground rules, are very vulnerable to disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. … ...

The first part of a recent article in The Hill began like many others, suggesting that the window was “closing for Congress to roll back Obama-era regulations” under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). It focused on the approaching deadline for Congress to vote on CRA joint resolutions of disapproval that were introduced to kill Obama&# ...

As many Pacific Legal Foundation employees have written about before, the power of administrative agencies has increased greatly over the last century. Many Americans are now subject to rules adopted not by elected officials, but by unelected bureaucrats in the “fourth branch of government.” Even worse, it is common practice for courts ...