Modeling Agency / Court Interaction


Emerson Tiller & Frank B. Cross

Responding to Matthew C. Stephenson, The Strategic Substitution Effect: Textual Plausibility, Procedural Formality, and Judicial Review of Agency Statutory Interpretations, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 528 (2006)

The positive political theory of legal rules, such as those providing for judicial review, has received far too little attention. Professor Matthew Stephenson’s analysis of his strategic substitution effect is therefore a significant development. In this Response, we acknowledge that he has made some material and valuable advances in the way we should think about the positive interaction of agencies and courts. However, his model has important limitations and in practice it may describe less than we would like. Nonetheless, the Article’s value can be found in its original conceptual ideas, which may be expanded upon to develop a more valuable theory of the effect of legal rules in administrative law.



120 Harv. L. Rev. F. 13 (2006) | DOWNLOAD PDF

Online Forum

Freeing Employee Choice: The Case For Secrecy in Union Organizing and Voting

Cynthia Estlund :: In his article Enabling Employee Choice, Professor Benjamin Sachs provided a nuanced analysis of what is wrong both with current law and with the leading reform proposal. In this response, Professor Cynthia Estlund argues that Professor Sachs’s reform proposal is likely to set the terms for future scholarly analysis and for serious public debate over the role of law in union organizing regardless of the fate of labor law reform in the current Congress. READ MORE

Not All Statistics Are Created Equal

D. James Greiner :: In Statistics Is a Plural Word, a response to my article Causal Inference in Civil Rights Litigation, Dean Steven Willborn and Professor Ramona Paetzold take issue both with my critique of regression as it is currently used in civil rights litigation and with my advocacy of the potential outcomes framework. In this Reply, I argue that Dean Willborn and Professor Paetzold’s response does not address (and thus cannot refute) the central lessons of Causal Inference, despite purporting to agree with those lessons. In particular, after “agree[ing] wholeheartedly” that a definition of a causal effect is necessary for the use of statistics in civil rights, Plural does not offer a definition. In the absence of such a definition, the purpose of statistics in civil rights litigation is unclear. The potential outcomes framework, in contrast, provides the needed definition and clarifies many subsidiary concepts, with salutary consequences following naturally from a start in the right place. READ MORE

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