Gray Matters

“Do NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) and other permitting requirements doom green energy and infrastructure plans?” That was the title of a recent webinar, organized by the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. The Gray Center’s Adam White moderated a discussion with Mario Loyola (Competitive Enterprise Institute) and Andrew Rosenberg (Union of... Source

For the last forty years, courts have been especially deferential to federal agencies’ claims of scientific expertise. And in the last year, we have seen the Supreme Court grapple repeatedly with questions of administrative decisions related to managing the Covid-19 pandemic. How much deference should courts afford agencies on scientific and technical matters? This was among the subjects discussed... Source

The Paycheck Protection Program was the single largest component of the federal pandemic relief legislation passed in March of 2020. Since then, a debate has developed about the program’s speed-accuracy trade-off, exposing the challenges administrators face when they’re responsible for administering vague statutes in emergency circumstances with little or no information up front. Prof. Source

Amid the Covid-19 crisis, Operation Warp Speed helped to develop vaccines with astonishing speed. But even with a fast-tracked FDA process, there still remain significant questions about risk, liability, and intellectual property. These are the subjects of two new Gray Center working papers by Professors Sam Halabi of the University of Missouri and Professor Kristen Osenga of the University of... Source

Executive orders are not a new tool of presidential power — all presidents have used them, and some much more than others. But in recent decades they seem to have become a more significant and prominent aspect of American government. In today’s episode, Bowdoin College’s Andrew Rudalevige and the Gray Center’s Adam White describe the processes of E.O. development, with special focus on the Office... Source

At least five Supreme Court justices seem interested in reconsidering the current version of the “Nondelegation Doctrine.” And their recent judicial opinions have inspired waves of new scholarship for and against judicial reform. Last spring, the Gray Center invited scholars to workshop new papers on the nondelegation doctrine; now those articles are online in our Working Paper Series... Source

The Biden Administration faces immensely consequential policy choices on questions of financial regulation—from the proper regulatory standards to apply to banks for the sake of safety, soundness, and systemic risk; to cryptocurrencies; to the use of financial regulatory agencies to drive policy on non-financial issues. And as the Gamestop/Robinhood saga highlighted, new technologies can radically... Source

Throughout his presidential campaign, Joe Biden called for national reforms to police practices and civil rights. Immediately after the election, his transition team highlighted Racial Equity as one of its four policy priorities. And right after his inauguration, he signed a set of initial executive actions focused generally on discrimination. Yet at the same time, he has argued that the focus... Source

From George Washington’s administration onward, the federal government’s power over financial markets and banks has always occupied a nebulous corner of American constitutional government. Recently the Gray Center posted three new working papers exploring different aspects of financial and monetary regulation. In this podcast, Adam White chats with two of the authors: Columbia Law School’s Lev... Source

“Tech policy” is a broad and nebulous label. But from antitrust to national security to social media moderation, recent years have been filled with difficult questions about federal law and policy, and myriad proposals for major new regulatory initiatives surrounding new technologies and big tech companies. Moreover, these debates scramble familiar partisan and ideological lines. Source