This article argues that the complex doctrine of judicial review of administrative action - containing no less than six separate tests depending on the sort of agency action to be reviewed - both descriptively is and normatively should be simplified into a “reasonable agency” standard....

Much of the social science literature on judicial behavior has focused on the impact of ideology on how judges vote. For the most part, however, legal scholars have been reluctant to embrace empirical scholarship that fails to address the impact of legal constraints and the means by which judges...

An increasingly common response by regulators to what they view as undesirable market trends or challenges has been a sharp turn towards litigation to introduce novel legal theories and frameworks that could have been the product or subject of legislative or administrative rulemaking. The...

This article adds an empirical perspective to the debate over the use of foreign authority by federal courts. It surveys sixty years of federal court practice in citing opinions from foreign high courts, through a citation count analysis. The data reveals that federal courts rarely cite to...

In traditional administrative law, agencies pass rules and courts review them. But what if agencies stopped acting by rule and started leading by example? With best practices rulemaking - a theoretically voluntary way of coordinating administrative action both within and across agencies -...

How should we understand the federal government's response to the financial crisis? The government's team, largely staffed by investment bankers, pushed the limits of its statutory authority to authorize an ad hoc series of deals designed to mitigate that crisis. It then decided to seek...

Traditionalists believe that foreign policy is forged by conflict between the legislature and the executive, with the judiciary acting as referee. We reject that paradigm, and make the case that the country's independent agencies, exemplified by its central bank, have become significant and...

The banking charter—the license a bank needs to obtain before it can open—has become the centerpiece of an argument about what finance should do for the rest of the economy, both in academia and at the banking agencies. Some advocates have proposed using the charter to pursue industrial...

The efforts to get the federal government out of the business of regulating insurance have been comprehensive but not entire. The project offers two insights about deregulation and how to do it. The first insight is comparative. Given that courts, Congress, and agencies have all tried to undo...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act allowed the Securities & Exchange Commission to bring almost any claim that it can file in federal court to its own Administrative Law Judges. The agency has since taken up this power against a panoply of alleged insider traders and other perpetrators of...