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Federal rulemaking has traditionally been understood as a text-bound, technocratic process. However, as this Article is the first to uncover, rulemaking stakeholders—including agencies, the President, and members of the public—are now deploying politically tinged visuals to push their agendas at every stage of high-stakes, often virulently controversial, rulemakings. Rarely do these visual contributions appear in the official rulemaking record, which remains defined by dense text, lengthy cost-benefit analyses, and expert reports. Perhaps as a result, scholars have overlooked the phenomenon we identify here: the emergence of a visual rulemaking universe that is splashing images, GIFs, and videos across social media channels. While this new universe, which we call “visual rulemaking,” might appear to be wholly distinct from the textual rulemaking universe on which administrative law has long focused, the two are not in fact separate. Visual politics are seeping into the technocracy.

This Article argues that visual rulemaking is a good thing. It furthers fundamental regulatory values, including transparency and political accountability. It may also facilitate participation by more diverse stakeholders—not merely regulatory insiders who are well-equipped to navigate dense text. Yet we recognize that visual rulemaking poses risks. Visual appeals may undermine the expert-driven foundation of the regulatory state, and some uses may threaten or outright violate key legal doctrines, including the Administrative Procedure Act and longstanding prohibitions on agency lobbying and propaganda. Nonetheless, we conclude that administrative law theory and doctrine ultimately can and should welcome this robust new visual rulemaking culture.

Nearly half of all employers consider applicants’ credit histories when making some hiring or promotion decisions—and they risk violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) when they do so. Employer credit checks have a potentially disparate impact on minorities and an attenuated relationship to asserted concerns about job performance and employee theft. The case law analyzing disparate impact challenges to credit check policies, meanwhile, is sparse, leaving employers with little direction as they shape their practices. This Note suggests that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issue detailed guidance on employers’ use of credit checks and proposes a novel framework drawn from agency guidance on the use of criminal records, which adopts the Eighth Circuit’s Green factors. Specifically, the EEOC ought to recommend that employers take into account the source or type of debt, the time between the “negative behavior” and the employment decision, and the nature of the job; the guidelines should also advocate for individualized assessments. Guidance along these lines would clarify what constitutes lawful credit check usage and benefit the job-seekers that Congress intended to protect with Title VII’s enactment.

The prevailing medical consensus is that drug addiction and alcoholism are disabilities. Before 1996, SSI and SSDI, the nation’s major disability benefits programs, recognized that consensus and provided benefits to people struggling with addiction. Then, the “DAA materiality” provision of Congress’s 1996 welfare reform legislation revoked eligibility not only from people struggling with addiction, but also from people with addiction and another severe disability whose addiction contributes to the severity of the other disability. For this latter group of “dual-diagnosis” claimants, it is often impossible to determine which of a claimant’s impairments would remain absent substance abuse. In such cases, the evidence is in equipoise, and whichever party bears the burden of proof of DAA materiality will lose. Despite its importance to many disability benefits claimants, the issue of who bears the burden of proof remains unresolved, with the Social Security Administration placing the burden on the government and a split among the federal appeals courts that have taken up the issue. This Note argues that the burden of proof of DAA materiality should fall on the government. It shows that the DAA materiality provision creates an exception to the definition of disability in the Social Security Act that functions like an affirmative defense for the government to deny benefits to otherwise eligible claimants. It then contrasts the many obstacles facing dual-diagnosis claimants with the government’s superior resources and expertise to offer proof on the complex DAA materiality issue.

Cities are once again on the rise and have become the site of major public debates, from income inequality and immigration policy to where and how Americans should live. While municipal leaders are often eager to fill the void in political leadership left by Congress and state elected officials, they are often hamstrung by state home rule laws, which define the powers states grant to municipalities. These laws limit, among other things, municipal taxing authority. Recently, local government scholars have wrestled with whether and how to grant municipalities more fiscal authority, but such scholarship has not provided a unified theory of municipal taxing authority.

This Article considers in detail whether and how to expand city taxing authority. It argues that state law should grant municipal governments “presumptive taxing authority.” This presumptive taxing authority would parallel municipal regulatory authority and be similarly subject to state preemption law. Such reform would open the door to more municipal revenue innovation, while ensuring that the state can vindicate its weighty policy interests.

The theory and reality of “administrative separation of powers” requires revisions to the longstanding legal, normative, and positive accounts of bureaucratic control. Because these leading accounts are often insufficiently attentive to the fragmented nature of administrative power, they tend to overlook the fact that internal administrative rivals—perhaps as much as Congress, the President, and the courts—shape agency behavior. In short, these accounts do not connect what we might call the old and new separation of powers. They thus fail to capture the multidimensional nature of administrative control in which the constitutional branches (the old separation of powers) and the administrative rivals (the new separation of powers) all compete with one another to influence administrative governance.

This Article, the first to connect novel insights regarding administrative separation of powers to old—and seemingly settled—debates over the design and desirability of bureaucratic control, (1) characterizes the administrative sphere as a legitimate, largely self-regulating ecosystem, (2) recognizes the capacity of three rivals—politically appointed agency heads, politically insulated civil servants, and members of the public—to internally police the administrative process, and (3) recasts judges, presidents, and legislators as custodians of the administrative arena tasked with preserving a well-functioning, rivalrous administrative separation of powers.

The controversial scheme of “expedited removal,” which gives low-level immigration officials the authority to deport people with little to no judicial review, came roaring back into the public consciousness in the wake of President Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending entry into the United States of individuals from certain Muslim-majority countries. Hugely controversial since its inception, challenges to the expedited removal statutory scheme are blocked by a sixty-day time limit to challenges to any regulations or procedures implementing the expedited removal provisions. Rather than address the constitutionality of the expedited removal system itself, this Note focuses on that sixty-day time limit. Congress frequently uses statutorily imposed time limits to curb judicial review of agency rules. But the validity of a statutory time limit on judicial review of agency rules cannot be evaluated independently of the scope of the judicial review that it restricts. When, as is the case with expedited removal, a statutory time limit forecloses the constitutional challenges of people whose claims could not have been raised during the prescribed time limit, that time limit poses serious constitutional concerns. In light of these concerns, this Note argues that courts should not read the expedited removal time-limit to bar constitutional challenges to the expedited removal system that could not have been raised within the prescribed time limit. Unfortunately, despite the disturbing constitutional implications of the expedited removal time limit, there are considerable doctrinal and jurisdictional challenges to convincing a court to exercise jurisdiction over such a challenge. The Note concludes by discussing some of these potential barriers and ways in which the planned future expansion of expedited removal might help to overcome some of these roadblocks.

Normally we don’t think of administrative agencies as policing constitutional equality norms. There’s a good reason for this—courts are often thought of as the “ultimate expositor” of constitutional meaning, while agencies are thought of as undertaking not constitutional interpretation, but statutory implementation. But recently scholars have explored the ways in which constitutionalism enters agency decisionmaking—commonly referred to as “administrative constitutionalism.” Administrative constitutionalism theories loosen the assumption that courts have a monopoly on constitutional understanding, and instead recognize agencies as constitutional actors in their own right. This Note explores how agencies have engaged in administrative constitutionalism to police LGBT equality rights—often in ways that differ markedly from judicial applications of equal protection. It then offers a defense of these practices, arguing that agencies have acted in the face of widespread underenforcement of equality norms by the judiciary owing largely to institutional considerations that—justified or not—have no bearing on the meaning of equal protection.

Under section 704 of the Administrative Procedure Act, courts can only review agency actions when they are “final.” In Bennett v. Spear, the Supreme Court put forth a seemingly simple two-part test for assessing final agency action. However, the second prong of that test—which requires agency actions to “create rights or obligations from which legal consequences flow” to be final—poses several problems. Most importantly, because it overlaps with the legal tests for whether a rule is a legislative rule or a nonbinding guidance document, it seems to effectively bar courts from reviewing nonlegislative rules before agencies have taken enforcement action. Because of this overlap, the Bennett test conflicts with—and thus undercuts—other principles of administrative law that seem to promote a pragmatic, flexible approach for courts to use in determining whether, when, and how to review agency rules. The result is a confusing standard of review that can prevent plaintiffs from challenging agency rules in court, especially when those plaintiffs are beneficiaries of regulation who will never be subject to enforcement action down the road. At the same time, however, courts should not be able to review every single agency rule before it is enforced. Agencies should be able to experiment, but should not be permitted to indefinitely shield potentially dangerous deregulatory programs from judicial review, as Bennett seems to allow. Accordingly, this Note argues that to be faithful to the Court’s commitment to “pragmatic” interpretation of the finality requirement, lower courts should follow a two-pronged approach to analyzing questions of final agency action. When courts can compel an agency to finalize its allegedly temporary action because of “unreasonable delay,” they should interpret Bennett’s second prong formally, holding that only truly legally binding action can be final. If this bars some plaintiffs from suing now, they will be able to challenge the rule later when the agency’s process is finished. But when courts cannot force agencies to finalize their rules, they should construe Bennett functionally, conceptualizing the agency’s allegedly temporary action under a “practically binding” standard. Under this framework, if the agency’s “temporary” action in practice consistently follows certain criteria, it should be viewed as binding and final under Bennett, and thus subject to judicial review, regardless of what the agency or its employees are legally required to do. This two-pronged approach would help to strike the right balance between the private party and the agency in a practical manner that depends upon the context.

This Article sheds light on significant doctrinal and policy issues that are central to the proper understanding of the administrative state. It grapples with a core question of administrative law: When are agencies established with features that insulate them from direct presidential control? Because of its constitutional significance, the legal literature focuses on removal protection for agency heads, and posits that agencies are more likely to be accorded such protection when the presidency and at least one of the chambers of Congress are controlled by different parties. The empirical support for this claim comes from a single political science study, which suffers from significant design flaws and has been widely misinterpreted. In fact, it shows that under almost all plausible scenarios Congress is less likely to vest agencies with indicia of independence under divided government.

To properly study the factors that affect the probability that agencies will be accorded indicia of independence we constructed and analyzed a new dataset. Three principal variables have a statistically significant impact: the approval rating of the President, the size of the Senate majority, and the alignment of the political party of the Senate majority and the President. The latter two variables had never been tested prior to our study. We find that Congress is less likely to establish agencies with indicia of independence when the President is popular. Moreover, when the Senate majority is not aligned with the President, an increase in the majority makes it more likely that Congress will establish an agency with indicia of independence. And, for a given size of Senate majority, alignment with the President makes it more likely that Congress will establish an agency with indicia of independence. Changes in the composition of the House do not produce comparable effects, suggesting that the Senate’s filibuster rule or the Senate’s role in confirming presidential appointees might play a role in this regard. Noting that the empirical results explain relatively little of the variation observed in the dataset related to when Congress establishes agencies with indicia of independence, this Article also explores the limitations of the quantitative empirical findings and the benefits of performing detailed case studies.

In administrative law, it is generally assumed that once an agency promulgates a final rule, its work on that project—provided the rule is not litigated—has come to an end. In order to ensure that these static rules adjust to the times, therefore, both Congress and the White House have imposed a growing number of formal requirements on agencies to “look back” at their rules and revise or repeal ones that are ineffective.

Our empirical study of the rulemaking process in three agencies (N = 462 revised rules to 183 parent rules) reveals that—contrary to conventional wisdom—agencies face a variety of incentives to revise and update their rules outside of such formal requirements. Not the least of these is pressure from those groups that are affected by their regulations. There is in fact a vibrant world of informal rule revision that occurs voluntarily and through a variety of techniques. We label this phenomenon “dynamic rulemaking.” In this Article, we share our empirical findings, provide a conceptual map of this unexplored world of rule revisions, and offer some preliminary thoughts about the normative implications of dynamic rulemaking for regulatory reform.