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…

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…

Originally published in Washington Examiner on July 8, 2019 Robert Shipp is serving the remainder of a federal prison sentence on an ankle monitor in Chicago, Illinois. But Shipp is being held unlawfully by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Even though he was due to be released from custody last month under a change in federal law,…

Chief Justice John Roberts lent the crucial fifth vote to uphold so-called Auer deference (solely on stare decisis grounds) in last week’s Kisor v. Wilkie case at the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, he wrote that “the distance between the majority and Justice Gorsuch is not as great as it may initially appear.” Roberts is dead wrong, and…

Wide consequences will stem from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision granting qualified immunity to several Fresno, California police officers sued for theft. These consequences will prove hard to unwind unless the court—as it should—rehears the case en banc and fixes it now. Imagine that a police officer, in the…

Originally published in Bloomberg Law on June 17, 2019 Fresno, Calif., police officers may have just gotten away with grand larceny. The Ninth Circuit recently passed on the opportunity to establish—once-and-for-all—that police officers stealing private property while executing a search warrant is, in fact, unconstitutional. The Jessop v. City of Fresno case brings to light a doctrine called…