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...

"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

"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

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

"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."

"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

"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

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

"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

Michael Asimow "proposes a set of best practices for conducting and improving informal adjudication"

"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

@awidman.bsky.social's empirical study on "the various regulatory structures governing nonlawyers" representation in agency adjudication.

@gillianmetzger.bsky.social on change in administrative law.

Thank goodness we've finally resolved that.

"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

"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

Grading done!

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...

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...

"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

Flying duck caught in Swiss speed trap believed to be repeat offender

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

"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."

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

"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

"notice-and-comment rulemaking was the product of a series of American transplantations of English rulemaking procedures" Rephael Stern

There’s so much happening right now, I thought I’d put together a running thread on the dismantling of #climate and research and knowledge infrastructure in the United States 🧵

"sunrise lawmaking" as a means of passing climate legislation. "Instead of writing laws that bind in the present, legislators using a sunrise deliberately delay the onset of any consequences for a significant period of time and, in so doing, buy political flexibility to take public-regarding action"

"if President Trump’s transformation of American government succeeds, it will be because the same principles that motivate opposition to the administrative state as a matter of political theory are consistent with the principles that will motivate an originalist SCt to sustain that transformation."

End-of-semester gift from my constitutional law class.

The House Judiciary Committee's reconciliation bill makes SIGNIFICANT changes to the Congressional Review Act. Among other things, it allows major rules that raise revenue to go into effect ONLY if Congress enacts a joint resolution of approval. www.politico.com/f/?id=000001...

Here's a rundown on Trump's environmental actions to date. The takeaway is simple. Name an environmental policy: Trump is working to end it. The threat is deadly serious. legal-planet.org/2025/04/28/a...

Over at the Notice and Comment blog, today's Ad Law Reading Room entry is "Appropriations Presidentialism," by @mblawrence.bsky.social, Eloise Pasachoff, and Zachary Price. Check it out! www.yalejreg.com/nc/ad-law-re...

All is not lost! While Trump is doing his best to destroy federal environmental law, states are quietly continue to strengthen their climate initiatives. There's not much Trump can do about it. legal-planet.org/2025/04/24/s...

"Here are the departments and agencies where Government Executive has confirmed RIFs have taken place or are about to occur."

"Projects requiring a full environmental impact statement, typically a two-year process, will be reviewed in roughly 28 days." Uh-huh.

"home insurance is becoming less available and more expensive across the nation. the near-total absence of data on premiums and claims enabled a predictable crisis to fester in the dark. the new data is county and ZIP code-level, allowing a closer geographic analysis than was previously possible."

Several recent Trump Administration actions have instructed agencies to use the 'good cause' exception to engage in deregulation without going through notice-and-comment. Our policy brief explains why each of these actions is a misuse of that exception. ⬇️ policyintegrity.org/publications...

Executive Functions is hiring Summer and Fall interns. open.substack.com/pub/executiv...

"So far, legislators have introduced 72 CRA resolutions targeting 46 unique rules from 23 different agencies. This represents an increase of 21.7 percent compared to the first Trump administration, where CRA resolutions targeted a total of 36 rules."

"in a spate of recent cases involving agency authority, the Supreme Court has embraced the idea that extrajudicial practice may settle the meaning of statutory text" @dtdeacon.bsky.social

Federal agencies serve the nation, but they also can provide unique local support. Law professor Todd Aagaard highlights the array of functions government agencies provide to our metro area. theconversation.com/from-busines...

"What if identifying something as a core or inherent Article II power is only the first step? you might also want to ask whether other provisions might limit that otherwise unlimited power." Elias Neibart

"administrative lawyers have failed to pay attention to stories and thus have missed the opportunities to encourage a more enlightened approach to thinking about rulemaking and administrative expertise." Elizabeth Fisher and Sidney Shapiro

Major questions "doctrine should be flipped on its head. The best way to safeguard democratic accountability is to focus not on the most salient issues of the day, but instead on the ones least important to the voters." @profnick.bsky.social