When the first person of color on the nation’s highest court retired three decades ago, the nation’s first female justice paid tribute to the invaluable experience he brought to what had been an exclusively white male institution. 

“Although all of us come to the court with our own personal histories and experiences, Justice [Thurgood] Marshall brought a special perspective,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 1992 in the Stanford Law Review. 

“At oral arguments and conference meetings, in opinions and dissents, Justice Marshall imparted not only his legal acumen but also his life experiences, constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth.”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s law school, lifts up O’Connor’s insight in a recent letter in support of another legal pioneer: Judge …

Arguments and judicial reasoning in administrative law cases usually focus on the case at hand. Indeed, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) commands that narrow focus. The APA does not give the courts any role in shaping the laws governing administrative agencies, for that is what Congress does. Instead, it gives the courts a modest, albeit difficult responsibility: They may determine whether a particular agency action is arbitrary and capricious or contrary to law. Therefore, parties challenging an agency rule they disapprove of generally argue that the agency has violated some restraint stated in the statute or exercised its discretion in an arbitrary way.

But in the U.S. Supreme Court case heard last week about the scope of EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (West Virginia v. EPA), coal companies relied heavily on a "parade of horribles" argument — a listing of bad things that …

This op-ed was originally published by Slate.

Last fall, on the same day that the parties to the Paris Agreement gathered in Glasgow for their first day of their annual international climate meeting, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review an appellate court decision about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases from fossil fuel power plants under the Clean Air Act.

Fast forward half a year: On February 28, the day that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change issued its sobering report on climate adaptation and harms to human and planetary well-being, the court heard oral arguments in the case—West Virginia v. EPA.

Once again, it was a split-screen reality.

In reaction to the report, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres stated, "Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership …

This op-ed was originally published in The American Prospect.

After the Supreme Court’s decision last month rejecting the Biden vaccine mandate for large employers, it wasn’t just the public health community that was asking “where do we go from here?” Environmental activists and attorneys immediately recognized that the Court’s reasoning in the vaccine case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, will likely lead to a win for the fossil fuel industry in the biggest environmental case of this term, West Virginia v. EPA.

On the surface, the vaccine case and West Virginia appear to involve totally different issues. NFIB was a challenge to an emergency regulation from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that required large employers to either verify COVID-19 vaccinations or compel their employees to wear masks and get tested. In a 6-3 decision, with the three liberals …

This op-ed was originally published in Washington Monthly.

When the conservative movement contrived to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues, one of the goals was to create a powerful ally in its campaign to dismantle the federal regulatory system, which we all depend on every day to safeguard our families, communities, and environment. With its recent decision in the emergency vaccine-or-test case, the Court’s conservative supermajority gave its clearest signal yet that it will advance this campaign from the bench.

The unsigned majority opinion and the concurrence authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, when read together, lay out a comprehensive blueprint for defeating regulation in the public interest. Significantly, the arguments they raise are firmly grounded in the long-standing conservative myth that the regulatory system lacks sufficient “democratic accountability.” Quoting the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the concurrence casts the stakes in stark terms, warning …

This op-ed was originally published by The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

In recent decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly interventionist on issues relating to the appointment and removal of officials. Nondelegation arguments have also escalated and even non-constitutional doctrines such as Chevron are debated in constitutional terms. But according to originalist scholars, who say that the Constitution should be understood based on its meaning at the time of drafting, these are necessary developments.

Although I am not an originalist, I had assumed that the originalist case must be a powerful one to justify such a forceful effort to overturn existing precedent. That turns out to have been a mistake on my part. Writing a book on presidential power led me to take a much closer look at the historical record and the recent scholarship on these questions. The work of scholars such as …

This op-ed was originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

The idea that unelected judges rather than an elected U.S. President should resolve "major questions" that arise in the course of executing law makes no sense. And the idea that major questions should be resolved to defeat policies that the two Houses of the U.S. Congress and the President have agreed to makes even less sense. Yet, the so-called "major questions doctrine" endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court's current majority suggests that the rule of law only governs minor cases, not matters of "vast economic and political significance."

In important cases, the Court has abandoned the role that the Administrative Procedure Act assigns it—checking the executive branch when it contravenes the policies that Congress and the President have approved. Instead, it has assumed the role of constraining the faithful execution …

This post was originally published on Verfassungsblog. It is reprinted under Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

On the same day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued decisions governing requests for emergency stays of two rules protecting Americans from COVID-19. Both rules relied on very similar statutory language, which clearly authorized protection from threats to health. Both of them presented strikingly bad cases for emergency stays. Yet, the Court granted an emergency stay in one of these cases and denied it in the other. These decisions suggest that the Court applies judicial discretion unguided by law or traditional equitable considerations governing treatment of politically controversial regulatory cases.

Similar cases decided differently

In NFIB v. OSHA, the Court stayed a rule insisting that large employers require either vaccination or testing and masking of their employees, but it denied a stay of a rule demanding vaccination of employees …

This op-ed was originally published by Slate.

On Feb. 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the first of an expected wave of cases challenging governmental action to address the climate crisis. The court’s grant of four petitions seeking review in this case—two by coal companies and two by states—portends that the six conservative justices will erect significant barriers to meaningful climate policy and will continue to interfere with democratic governance in disregard of the rule of law.

The issue presented in the case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, concerns the EPA’s authority to regulate pursuant to its mandate in the Clean Air Act. Oddly, there’s no regulation in effect for the court to review; instead, it will ostensibly review the interpretation of the act adopted by the Obama administration nearly a decade ago, which gave the EPA the …