Notes

This Note examines the phenomenon of deregulation through nonenforcement, drawing on examples from the George W. Bush Administration. It argues that the presumption of nonreviewability afforded to agency refusals to prosecute creates incentives for presidential administrations pursuing deregulatory agendas to manipulate agency enforcement practices. Furthermore, it contends that deregulation through nonenforcement is undesirable because it shields executive branch policy decisions from public view, thereby reducing accountability. Perhaps counterintuitively, the Note suggests that one way to counteract the negative effects of the presumption of nonreviewability is to reduce the level of review applied to other categories of agency action, such as notice-and-comment rulemaking, thus increasing the executive’s ability to act through more accountable means.

Modern agriculture has vast environmental externalities. The pesticides, fertilizers, and sediments in irrigation runoff pollute surface and groundwater; single-crop farms destroy biodiversity; and massive amounts of fossil fuels are burned in agricultural production, post-harvest processing, and shipping. Nevertheless, farming operations have largely escaped the post-1970 expansion of federal environmental regulation. Compounding the problem, federal farm policy has encouraged the very farming practices that most cause this degradation.

In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA), which created an organic food certification and labeling system. While OFPA’s primary purposes are to facilitate the growth of the organic sector and to protect consumers, this Note suggests that the Act’s secondary purpose, underimplemented by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is to foster sustainable farming practices. This Note explores whether the OFPA’s organic labeling system does or could fill the regulatory gap described above.

This Note finds that under current standards the labeling program does not foster sustainable farming, not only because of shortfalls with the standards themselves but also because the market suffers from a freerider problem: Organic foods cost more, but consumers do not want to pay more for dispersed public benefits. Strengthening the standards would drive up production costs and exacerbate the freerider problem, but this Note argues that the USDA could mitigate the resulting decline in demand by taking advantage of the fact that organic products bundle sustainability, a public good for which people are not willing to pay much, with health, a private good for which many people are willing to pay more.

Many policies in foreign affairs law increase national security at the expense of national wealth and vice versa. Courts have struggled to find a suitable framework for adjudicating cases arising out of these policy decisions. In the recent case United States v. Eurodif S.A., the Supreme Court seemingly abandoned previous assumptions about security-wealth cases, relying instead on the Chevron framework commonly used in administrative law. This Note outlines the potential shift to Chevron and its merits vis-à-vis older frameworks for security-wealth cases. It concludes that Eurodif may well represent a profound change in the Court’s treatment of international relations and predicts that continued application of the Chevron framework will improve foreign policymaking.

While one primary goal of the Endangered Species Act is to prevent the global extinction of species, it is less clear whether the Act is intended, and can be used, to protect species that are endangered solely within the United States. Although the global preservation of species may be sufficient to achieve many of the goals of the Endangered Species Act, some goals may only be completely served by ensuring that certain populations of species occur within the United States, even if the animals are abundant elsewhere. The current Distinct Population Segment Policy being used by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to determine whether to list domestic populations of species as threatened or endangered only allows the agencies to protect these population segments if they are significant to the species’ taxon as a whole. This Note argues that this policy should be changed because there are many compelling reasons to protect domestic populations of particular species, even if these species are abundant elsewhere, and suggests criteria that should be used to determine whether a particular population segment should be protected, including the species’ conservation status and importance to the American people. It also demonstrates that this proposal would be consistent with the goals of the Endangered Species Act.

The world faces collective action problems that are global in nature and scope, rendering nation-states unable to achieve desired goods individually. Issues such as global climate change and systemic financial risk create externalities that impel the existence and intervention of a world government to avoid suboptimal market equilibria, free-riding, and moral hazards. I submit the European Union’s principle of subsidiarity as an organic, legitimizing framework for global governance that both compels and cabins a world government. Subsidiarity optimizes social welfare by enabling a world government to achieve desired goods that nation-states would be otherwise unable to obtain individually because of collective action problems. But subsidiarity also limits a world government through a presumption in favor of local regulation as a matter of national autonomy and efficiency. The efficiency concern also enables subsidiarity to be an expansive principle for global governance because it accommodates both public and private forms of collective action. Public forms of collective action include public regulations, treaties between nations, and public institutions like the World Trade Organization. Private forms of collective action include free-market Coasian bargaining between private parties and the efforts of private international institutions like Greenpeace. Because subsidiarity accounts for these diverse institutions in a large and complex world, it is an ideal balancing principle for global institutional choice.

Victims of consumer fraud often struggle to bring their claims as nationwide class actions under traditional state fraud laws due to (1) the application of many states’ laws to potential class members’ claims and (2) the fact that fraud claims generally raise a significant individual factual issue—whether the claimant personally relied on the defendant’s misrepresentation. The civil remedy provisions in RICO offer an attractive alternative. RICO overcomes the first hurdle by providing plaintiffs with a single federal law under which to file suit. This Note demonstrates that RICO allows plaintiffs to overcome the second hurdle as well. Rather than showing that they incurred harm when they purchased products in reliance on a misrepresentation, plaintiffs can achieve class certification by framing their injury as a harm common to all purchasers of a product: specifically, an increase in the price of the product due to artificially increased demand. Recently, several classes have moved successfully for certification using this approach. This Note provides a theoretical framework to justify this method. Rather than committing the same error as most courts and commentators by viewing this approach as an extension of the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance from securities fraud cases, I argue that there is no need to presume reliance because the Supreme Court’s holding in Bridge v. Phoenix Bond & Indemnity Co. makes clear that individual, personal reliance is not necessary to prove causation in RICO claims. Instead, plaintiffs can satisfy RICO’s causation element through statistical analyses that prove aggregate reliance—reliance on the fraud by a large enough number of individuals to increase the price of the product above the price that it would have been absent the fraud. As all purchasers of the product experience the same price differential, the statistical analyses provide common proof of causation of identical harm, eliminating problematic individual inquiries and opening the door to certification of nationwide consumer fraud class actions.

This Note examines judicial review and oversight of state educational adequacy remedies in light of education budget cuts proposed during the recent recession. Educational adequacy litigation has been relatively successful in establishing children’s affirmative right to education under state constitutions, but due to separation of powers concerns, most state courts have been quite deferential to legislatures in reviewing remedies for constitutional violations. This leaves many schools underfunded and under-resourced in spite of successful adequacy litigation—a problem that is aggravated during times of recession, when many states face pressure to cut education budgets. This Note examines these issues using functional separation of powers theory, comparative analysis of state and federal government functioning, and pragmatic considerations related to remedial compliance. It argues that state courts should apply heightened judicial review to ensure remedial compliance and particularly to review state education budget cuts that may disrupt educational adequacy remedies. In this way, state courts can be more vigilant in maintaining educational adequacy.

One of the basic requirements for patenting an invention is that the invention be
nonobvious. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Graham v. John Deere,
secondary considerations—also known as objective indicia of nonobviousness—
have been considered when determining whether an invention is nonobvious. Secondary
considerations provide tangible evidence of the economic and motivational
issues relevant to the nonobviousness of an invention. Types of secondaryconsiderations
evidence include commercial success, long-felt but unmet need, and
copying by competitors. For many years, the Federal Circuit’s teaching, suggestion,
or motivation test often eliminated the need for the court to rely on secondary considerations
in the obviousness inquiry. Due to the Federal Circuit’s stringent application
of this test, the obviousness inquiry was generally resolved by examining the
prior art.
In 2007, the Supreme Court decided KSR v. Teleflex, which endorsed a flexible
obviousness analysis and rejected the Federal Circuit’s strict application of the
teaching, suggestion, or motivation test. Following KSR, scholars predicted that
secondary-considerations evidence would provide a critical tool for patentees
seeking to demonstrate the nonobviousness of an invention. Inspired by that prediction,
this Note evaluates how secondary-considerations evidence has been utilized
in the first few years post-KSR. It finds that the Federal Circuit has continued to
impose stringent relevancy requirements on the use of secondary-considerations
evidence, and that it remains difficult for patentees to employ secondary considerations
in favor of a nonobviousness conclusion. Specifically, secondaryconsiderations
evidence has not been used with much success outside of pharmaceutical
patent cases. More often than not, the Federal Circuit has summarily dismissed
secondary-considerations evidence as insufficient in cases involving
mechanical arts patents. This Note concludes by suggesting that the Federal
Circuit’s current practice for using secondary considerations should inform proposals
by scholars for industry-specific tailoring of the patent system and patent
law’s use of secondary considerations, and that the Federal Circuit should continue
to engage with secondary-considerations evidence in order to provide more guidance
to lower courts during the post-KSR transition period.

How, and how much, does the Constitution protect against political entrenchment?
Judicial ineptitude in dealing with this question—on display in the modern Court’s
treatment of partisan gerrymandering—has its roots in Luther v. Borden. One hundred
and sixty years after the Luther Court refused jurisdiction over competing
Rhode Island state constitutions, judicial regulation of American structural democracy
has become commonplace. Yet getting here—by going around Luther—has
deeply shaped the current Court’s doctrinal posture and left the Court in profound
disagreement about its role in addressing substantive questions of democratic fairness.
While contemporary scholars have demonstrated enormous concern for the
problem of the judicial role in policing political entrenchment, Luther’s central role
in shaping this modern problem has not been fully acknowledged. In particular,
Justice Woodbury’s concurrence in Luther, which rooted its view of the political
question doctrine in democratic theory, has been completely ignored. This Note
tells Luther’s story with an eye to the road not taken.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promulgated the Tailoring
Rule. The Rule “tailors” the numeric triggers for permitting requirements in the
Clean Air Act by revising the numbers upward by several orders of magnitude.
EPA argued that doing so was necessary to avoid the impossible administrative
burden that would result from having to carry out the plain text of the Act as
applied to greenhouse gases. At first glance, the Tailoring Rule seems to be a classic
case of an agency exceeding its authority and subverting congressional intent. Upon
further examination, it becomes clear that EPA is grappling with an important issue
that current administrative law doctrine fails to adequately address: What should an
agency do when it does not have the resources to carry out all of its required duties?
This Note argues that courts should use the rationale of administrative necessity to
allow agencies to openly demonstrate that it would be impossible to fully carry out
their nondiscretionary statutory duties. Upon that demonstration, courts should
allow agencies to promulgate regulations that propose a solution to that
impossibility.