Administrative Remedies
Most power in modern government doesn’t move through Congress or the courts. It moves through agencies: who writes the rules, who interprets them, and who decides when something crosses a line.
This channel breaks those systems down in layers:
• short ideas that highlight patterns
• brief explainers that show how they work
• longer episodes that walk through real examples
If you want to understand rules, power, and process — and why structure matters more than most people realize — start anywhere. When something clicks, go deeper.
Mullin v. Doe: When Courts Can't Look
Fritz Miot has lived in California for fifteen years under Temporary Protected Status, working in an Alzheimer's research lab while managing a diabetes diagnosis that Haiti's collapsed healthcare system can't treat. On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court told him a federal court isn't allowed to ask wh...
Trump v. Slaughter: The End of the Independent Agency
For ninety years, Congress could build federal agencies designed to operate at arm's length from the president. Bipartisan commissions, staggered terms, for-cause removal — a whole architecture of institutional independence protected by Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). On June 29, 2026, ...
No Right to a Lawyer: Asylum from Inside Detention
A visitation room in a private detention facility in rural Louisiana. Cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, two plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Elena is on one side. A lawyer who drove three hours from New Orleans is on the other. They have ninety minutes. Elena has eight months until the heari...
The Framework That Decides Disability
Until June 2024, the Social Security Administration was denying disability claims on the grounds that applicants could work as pneumatic tube operators — a job that functionally disappeared decades ago. The agency's catalog of occupations hadn't been updated since 1991. Congress noticed. Courts comp...
Nobody Said Deny More Cases: How Agency Preferences Reach the Hearing Room
In the final episode of a three-part series on how agencies actually produce outcomes, Gwen and Marc trace the mechanisms that did the work — all of them upstream of the hearing room and mostly invisible from outside: • Case completion targets that measure speed but not thoroughness — and a Seventh ...
The Review Layer Doesn't Fix It — Three Things Agency Review Does Instead
In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reached into a single immigration case, certified it to himself, and overruled the precedent that had let domestic violence survivors qualify for asylum. In 2021, Garland certified it back. In 2025, Bondy certified it away again. Three reversals on the same do...
The Forty-Six Point Spread: Why Your Outcome Depends on Who You Get, Who Represents You, and Wher...
A 2017 GAO study found that Social Security disability outcomes could swing by forty-six percentage points based solely on which ALJ heard the case. Same claimant, same record, same hearing office, different judge. Individual ALJ approval rates range from under ten percent to over ninety. That's not...
Same Evidence, Different Outcomes: How Credibility and Burden of Proof Decide What Happens in the...
Two claimants walk into two hearing rooms in the same building on the same day. Same herniated disc, same imaging, same attorneys, same legal standard. One walks out with benefits. The other doesn't. The difference isn't the evidence — it's that one ALJ believed her claimant and the other didn't. In...
The Lifecycle of an Administrative Case: How the Record Gets Built Before You Walk Into the Room
An insurance adjuster spends thirty minutes on your roof, photographs what they photograph, and writes "minor cosmetic damage" instead of "structural compromise." That characterization is now in the record — and every reviewer after that is seeing the damage through that adjuster's eyes. Gwen and Ma...
Jarkesy Jumps to the FTC
Jarkesy Jumps to the FTC Less than two years after the Supreme Court's decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, the Fifth Circuit has applied the same constitutional logic to the FTC — and the implications are far bigger than one agency. In Intuit v. FTC, the court vacated a cease-and-desist order against TurboT...