A few thoughts on the provision in the big beautiful bill that purports to limit courts' enforcement of contempt citations: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/u...
Republican Bill Would Limit Judges’ Contempt Power
nytimes.com
Kati Kovacs
@ksquare90.bsky.social
Law professor at Rutgers, #adlaw and natural resources law nerd, former DOJ lawyer and Interior Department appointee https://law.rutgers.edu/bio/kek130 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1530934
"The Supreme Court, by contrast, has undermined lower courts seeking to protect the rule of law and emboldened an administration eager to trample it." @kateshaw.bsky.social
Kate Shaw@kateshaw.bsky.social · last yr.I’ve got a piece in the @nytimes.com this morning on the Supreme Court’s quiet but radical shadow-docket order last week handing Trump yet another tool to eliminate independent expertise & authority and consolidate presidential control over the executive branch www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/o...
"Under Trump, presidential subordinates implementing the President’s directions wrt law execution are just as absolutely immune as he is. And the immunity applies to any congressional or judicial attempt to constrain the President’s conclusive and preclusive power." @twmorrison.bsky.social
All the President's Men
The presidency of the United States is an immensely consequential role. It is also just immense. As the Supreme Court has explained, “Because no single person c
papers.ssrn.com
Trump has spattered the WH website with anti-environmental executive orders. They range from the inane (fighting to save paper straws and wasteful showerheads) to the destructive (saving obsolete coal plants and stopping wind turbines). Here's the list. legal-planet.org?p=43125
legal-planet.org
"In Ohio v. EPA, the Court faulted the agency for not adequately grappling, at the time of rulemaking, with at least some subset of the millions of alternate futures that judicial intervention could create." @jacklienke.bsky.social "explores its troubling implications for future rulemaking."
Every Court Everywhere All at Once: <i>Ohio v. EPA</i> and the Litigation Multiverse
Agencies issuing rules have always faced the risk of getting sued. But they have not traditionally faced the risk of getting sued for failing to discuss their r
papers.ssrn.com
"Drawing on the Australian model, this article emphasizes the advantages of a systematic, bipartisan, and principles-based approach [to legislative review of rules] over the current ad hoc, partisan, and policy-driven approach in the United States." Lorne Neudorf
Learning from Australia: Strengthening Congressional Scrutiny of Federal Agency Rulemaking
This article considers insights from the Australian Parliament’s Senate standing committee that systematically scrutinizes new agency rules under established sc
papers.ssrn.com
"Subordinating the President to law means subordinating the President to Congress, and this is what a genuine respect for the separation of powers would require." @dfroomkin.bsky.social
Presidency Exceptionalism
Trump v. United States, which declared the President to be immune from prosecution for any act performed in the course of exercising their “exclusive” constitut
papers.ssrn.com
My 2024 Const Day remarks on US v. Skrmetti's implications for wider EP doctrine are now on SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=526.... The major takeaway: each of the ways the S Ct could rule *against* heightened scrutiny for trans ppl wd require doing damage to one of the core principles of modern EP doctrine
Transgender Equality: An Inflection Point for Equal Protection?
<div> This Term, the Supreme Court is hearing its first case addressing the Equal Protection rights of the transgender community, <i>United States v. Skrmetti<
papers.ssrn.com
"Presidential administration is now facing a moment of reckoning. While we do still live in the age of presidential administration, how long the age might last and what political possibilities it promises are open to question." AhMenblum @narosenblum.bsky.social
Wait a Second - Who Put The President in Charge of Everything? - Administrative Law
Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, & Noah A. Rosenblum, The Making of Presidential Administration, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 2131 (2024).Richard MurphyNinety years ago, a unanimous Supreme Court thought it obvious tha...
adlaw.jotwell.com
Michael Asimow "proposes a set of best practices for conducting and improving informal adjudication"
The Last Frontier: Fair Procedure in Informal Administrative Adjudication
<p><span>The federal government engages in massive amounts of informal adjudication. Informal adjudication means a process that resolves a dispute between
papers.ssrn.com
"Loper Bright’s promise of independent judicial interpretation of statutes could better police the implementation of immigration law if courts take humanitarian concerns into account when exercising their independent judgment about the meaning of immigration statutes." @jillfamily.bsky.social
Immigration Law after Chevron’s Demise
The Supreme Court held in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that the Administrative Procedure Act does not require federal courts to defer to reasonable agency interpret
papers.ssrn.com
@awidman.bsky.social's empirical study on "the various regulatory structures governing nonlawyers" representation in agency adjudication.
Representation, Calibrated
More people interact with administrative adjudications than with courts, and the lack of lawyers to assist people in these proceedings remains at crisis levels.
papers.ssrn.com
"Legalistic noncompliance occurs when the administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not." @dtdeacon.bsky.social @leahlitman.bsky.social
Dan Deacon@dtdeacon.bsky.social · last yr.Thanks to @lsolum.bsky.social for highly recommending “Legalistic Noncompliance” by me and @leahlitman.bsky.social! lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/...
"private enforcement does not violate Article II, except when it amounts to a criminal prosecution, enforces governmental property interests, or crowds the executive out from enforcement entirely—and even then, only under narrow conditions" Nitisha Baronia, Jared Lucky, Diego Zambrano
Private Enforcement at the Founding and Article II
Article II vests the executive power in the President. Yet Congress routinely empowers private plaintiffs, not just the President, to enforce public regulatory
papers.ssrn.com
Jotwell@jotwell.bsky.social · last yr.reviewing Nitisha Baronia, Jared Lucky, & Diego A. Zambrano, Private Enforcement at the Founding and Article II, 114 Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (May 8, 2024).
Law students and recent grads! Thinking about clerking? Don’t overlook state courts. State Court Report has a new resource w/ info and deadlines for 95 state supreme court justices. Check it out! @statecourtreport.bsky.social statecourtreport.org/state-judici...
State Judicial Clerkship Resource
statecourtreport.org
Hey, speaking of the importance of public utility regulators: here's a jobs board showing all the PUC positions open across the country. There's no better place to leverage positive change. We badly need good people in these spots! Tell your energy nerd friends to apply!
Bizarrely, the Trump Administration is trying to roll back energy-saving rules at the VERY SAME TIME that they're claiming we're in a dire energy emergency without enough power to meet surging demand. Not to mention that the rollback is illegal. legal-planet.org/2025/05/14/n...
No, DOE, You Can't Roll Back Product Efficiency Standards - Legal Planet
Trump says the grid is desperately struggling --a strange time to eliminate energy-saving regulations. DOE’s effort to roll back product efficiency standards is also illegal.
legal-planet.org
"courts in the United States are comparatively less likely to be captured than those of many other countries and more able to resist an authoritarian populist regime, but also somewhat more likely to facilitate democratic backsliding on their own account." Stephen Gardbaum
Lawrence Solum@lsolum.bsky.social · last yr.Gardbaum on Courts and Democratic Backsliding, buff.ly/VNzJa4W - Stephen Gardbaum (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - School of Law) has posted Courts and Democratic Backsliding: A Comparative Perspective on the United States (46 Law & Policy 349 (2024)) on SSRN.
Today, House Republicans are unveiling their plan to increase energy bills and pollution for everyday Americans, just to give billionaires another tax break. A summary of their proposals. THREAD! 🧵
Fantastic blog post by our great Golieb fellow @nwdonahue.bsky.social, recovering the Progressive Era intellectual terms at the heart of Humphrey’s Executor (and so agency independence) — quick and critical read
Nathaniel Donahue@nwdonahue.bsky.social · last yr.Humphrey’s protects “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” agencies, but lets the president fire the heads of “purely executive” agencies. These categories come out of Progressive theory and were developed to fend off separation-of-powers challenges to expert admin agencies 2/
"The Powelliphanta land snails are among some of the largest in the world, roughly the size of a golf-ball, and found only in New Zealand. They are slow growing and can live for decades. They eat mostly slugs and earthworms, which they slurp up like spaghetti."
Rare large carnivorous New Zealand snail filmed for the first time laying egg from its neck – video
The NZ department of conservation was performing a routine weight check on the snail when a small, white egg began to emerge from it's slimy neck
theguardian.com
City Planner Gets Halfway Through Designing City Before Realizing He’s Just Doing Philadelphia Again theonion.com/city-pl...
"Cost reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to show up in the data. DOGE seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. If you thought DOGE was really about cutting costs, you were never in on the joke." @jessicabriedl.bsky.social
The Actual Math Behind DOGE’s Cuts
If you thought Elon Musk was really trying to cut costs, you weren’t in on the joke.
theatlantic.com
"If the First Congress intended to limit the default remedies of a federal court to the remedies available in Chancery c.1789, how did the First Congress imagine courts would determine what those English remedies were?" H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui
Legal History Blog@legalhistoryblog.bsky.social · last yr.