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Commentary

Deference to the Bureau of Prisons Results in Time Lost for Thousands Under Its Custody

August 8, 2019
Haley Connor
The rule of lenity requires that if a criminal statute is ambiguous, courts must interpret the ambiguity in a manner favorable to the defendant. There are two primary reasons for the rule of lenity. First, criminal laws must provide people with fair notice so people can live by the law. Second, it is the legislature’s…
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FDA Shadow Regulations Target Fido’s Dinner

August 8, 2019
Ethan Beck
Answers Pet Food, a brand created by Pennsylvania-based company Lystn to provide high quality, organic pet food, is being targeted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for failing to comply with an unofficial, zero-tolerance policy toward naturally occurring strands of salmonella in minimally processed pet foods. The FDA refers to the policy as “guidance.”…
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Going off the Rails: The CA High-Speed Rail Authority

August 7, 2019
Gelane Diamond
Billions of dollars over budget. Years behind schedule. Hundreds of acres of land taken from Central Valley farmers, who are still waiting to receive their compensation. How did a project to build America’s first high-speed railway become such a wreck? The answer is simple: a lack of oversight exercised by the governor and legislature over…
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WSJ Letter to the Editor in Response to NCLA Commentary: The SEC Should Follow Its Own Rules for Guidance

August 6, 2019
Mark Chenoweth’s and Peggy Little’s “Secret Laws for the Powerful” (op-ed, July 24) focuses on regulation without notice-and-comment rule-making. Unfortunately, despite the Trump administration’s pronouncements to the contrary, this practice continues. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Share Class Selection Disclosure Initiative is a headline-grabbing example in which 79 financial institutions were faulted for not taking in 2014-18…
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Secret Laws for the Powerful

By: Margaret A. Little July 24, 2019
The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo recently reminding all federal administrative agencies that “the Constitution vests all Federal legislative power in Congress.” That may seem obvious, but agencies often regulate Americans beyond their lawful authority and without accountability. Our organization—the New Civil Liberties Alliance—has petitioned 18 agencies to adopt a permanent rule…
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FINRA is a Double-Delegation Disaster

July 19, 2019
Jay Schaefer
Photo by Ajay Suresh, Rights Reserved The current nondelegation doctrine may not be long for this world, evidenced by the concurrence and dissent in this term’s Gundy v. United States. In its present iteration, the doctrine allows Congress to give away legislative authority to agencies so long as the authority is pursuant to an “intelligible principle,”…
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Joe Martyak
Senior Director of Communications and Marketing
Trevor Schakohl
Communications Specialist