Volume 92, Number 1

Many scholars and policy makers celebrate cities as loci for addressing climate change. In addition to being significant sources of carbon pollution, cities prove to be dynamic sites of experimentation and ambition on climate policy. However, as U.S. cities set climate change goals far above those of their federal and state counterparts, they are butting up against the limits of their existing legal authority, most notably with regard to control over energy supplies. In response, many U.S. cities are exercising their legal rights to reclaim public ownership or control over private electric utilities as a method of achieving their climate change goals.

Although there is widespread desire for cities to act within their legal authority to reduce carbon pollution, it is a different question entirely whether they should be encouraged to expand this authority by reclaiming ownership or control over tasks previously outsourced to private companies. On this question, energy law has much to learn from administrative law’s robust attention to outsourcing theory. This Article draws from the outsourcing literature to argue that climate change complicates traditional theories regarding whether cities should prefer publicly or privately owned electricity systems. By transposing these theories into energy law, it constructs a theoretical defense of why more public forms of energy ownership or control may be effective governance tools for the climate change era. In the last century, providing electricity was a task well suited to government oversight of private companies, as regulators primarily aimed to incentivize low prices and adequate supply. This century, however, climate change creates the need for more deliberative, experimental management of electricity to meet the additional aim of decarbonization while maintaining affordability and reliability. In this situation, outsourcing theory widely counsels against utilizing a private contractor model, and illustrates the difficulties inherent in using regulation to manage private companies. Instead, it is time for broader reconsideration of more public forms of energy control and ownership, of just the sort that leading U.S. cities are pioneering.

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.

Courts routinely begin their analyses of discrimination claims with the question of whether the plaintiff has proven he or she is a “member of the protected class.” Although this refrain may sometimes be an empty formality, it has taken on real bite in a significant number of cases. For example, one court dismissed a claim by a man who was harassed with anti-Mexican slurs because he was of African American rather than Mexican ancestry. Other courts have dismissed sex discrimination claims by LGBT plaintiffs on the ground that LGBT status is not a protected class. Yet other courts have dismissed claims by white people alleging they were harmed by white supremacist violence and straight people alleging they were harmed by homophobic harassment. This Article terms this phenomenon “protected class gatekeeping.” It argues that protected class gatekeeping is grounded in dubious constructions of antidiscrimination statutes, and that its routine use prevents equality law from achieving its central aim: dismantling sexism, racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and other such biases. While past scholarship has identified certain forms of protected class gatekeeping, it has not recognized the scope of the problem or addressed the progressive intuitions that underlie it. Critical examination of protected class gatekeeping is of pressing importance as legislatures, courts, and legal scholars debate new statutory language and doctrinal frameworks for discrimination claims.

Political gerrymandering has been a feature of our republic since the early days of the United States. The majority of states in the U.S. allow state legislators to draw the district lines for legislative elections. Legislator-led redistricting is plagued with legislator conflict of interest, producing elections that are spectacularly uncompetitive and rampant with partisanship. In the process, the interests of voters are in conflict with the party and individual interests of legislators, threatening the legitimacy of our republican form of government. The results are often incumbent entrenchment in “safe seats” and overt partisan-based district manipulation. While not necessarily indicative that the will of the people is being usurped by the ambitions of legislators, one must inevitably ask, are voters choosing their legislators or are legislators choosing their voters? Until recently, the Supreme Court has taken a “hands-off” approach to remedying the negative effects of the partisan gerrymandering that occurs in states employing legislator-led redistricting. In Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona voters’ right to transfer redistricting authority from state legislators to an independent commission of citizens via ballot initiative. This Note argues that the delegation theory applied by the Court in the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission decision, and the authority of voters to be the supreme regulators of the political market, is supported by the Framers’ vision of political competition and accountability as articulated in The Federalist Papers.