Full Transcript

S1E15 Transcript — Corner Post: Coming to the Regulatory Nuisance

Gwen: Hello, and welcome to Administrative Remedies, because you can’t fix what you don’t understand. Brought to you in part by the University of Tulsa College of Law. I’m Gwendolyn Savitz, an associate professor here at TU and the associate dean of research and intellectual life.

Marc: And I’m Marc Roark. I’m the dean of the College of Law.

Gwen: We’ll be breaking down complex doctrines with real-life analogies and examples to demystify the world of administrative law for everyone trying to understand how government actually works.

Marc: Agencies are the main way the federal government gets things done. It’s not through Congress for reasons we’ll be addressing over the course of this series.

Gwen: Last time we talked about how Loper Bright killed Chevron deference, that courts no longer defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. But today we need to talk about a decision from the same term that might be even more destabilizing. And to explain it, we’re going to pull in some property law.

Marc: Property law? On an administrative law podcast, now we are cooking with gas. All right. Tell me about coming to the nuisance.

Gwen: Imagine that you’re buying a house. You find this perfect house in this lovely neighborhood that sits right outside of the busiest airport in the city. And after living in this house for a couple of months, you realize that the 5 a.m. flights make a ton of noise. They shake the house. They cause all kinds of pollutants in the air. And this really becomes very annoying to you. Do you get to claim that as a nuisance against the airport?

Marc: The answer is no, because you literally came to the nuisance. The airport was there first, and you decided to move in next to the airport.

Gwen: Why does that rule exist?

Marc: The law exists primarily because we try to give people some level of finality and reliance on the interests that they hold. So the airport has an economic investment in the land that it’s operating. It schedules flights. It employs people. It has this massive economic impact on the community relating to its use of the land. So it wouldn’t really be fair to say that a landowner can interfere with that economic use of the land when they’re the ones that disrupted the use in the first place.

Gwen: It’s talking about ensuring that people can rely on settled expectations.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. People have an expectation for how their land will be used.

Gwen: What if the rule worked the other way?

Marc: That would be chaos, right? We would not want landowners to be able to come in and to say, you have to stop this thing you’ve been doing for 25, 50 years in this place that’s created employment, that’s created opportunities, just because this one person has moved into the neighborhood and has found it a little disruptive.

Gwen: Welcome to Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Marc: They came to the nuisance.

Gwen: Yes, we are indeed talking about coming to the nuisance. This is about when the statute of limitations ends to challenge regulations. It turns what had been a six-year deadline into a rolling, forever resetting clock.

Marc: Time is meaningless.

Gwen: Yes, this is really an existential crisis. Time has no meaning. What we’re talking about is coming to the regulatory nuisance, except this time the newcomer wins.

Marc: Let’s talk about what the statute of limitations is to begin with, because that matters a lot here. Statute of limitations are standard limits on when legal actions can be brought, either challenging legislative acts or raising private claims within a court system. Sometimes we call them prescriptive limits. They prescribe when an action can be brought.

Gwen: Why would we want to have these limits?

Marc: There’s several reasons. One is evidence. People’s memories get short. Documents get lost, witnesses become unavailable. The longer you wait to sue, the harder it is to figure out what actually happened. But also, people begin to rely on pre-existing arrangements. So people make decisions based on the assumption that if no one’s challenged something for years, this is probably settled out, and therefore they make some economic choices. And third, it is a range of finality. We have this idea in the law that the capacity to solve problems legally has a certain finite limit to it. And at some point, people, institutions need to know that disputes are just simply resolved and that we should move on.

Gwen: This makes sense. For challenges to federal agency action, the relevant statute for most cases is 28 U.S.C. 2401(a), which says that you have six years to sue the United States. Six years from when the claim accrues.

Marc: When does a claim accrue?

Gwen: Well, that’s the billion-dollar question.

Marc: Literally billion?

Gwen: Many billions. Billions and billions. For decades, courts said that the clock starts running when the agency issues a regulation. It’s published in the Federal Register, six years from then.

Marc: Even if you don’t know about the regulation? Even if you’re not in business yet?

Gwen: Yes, even then, because regulations are generally applicable. They apply to everybody in a certain category, all banks or all power plants or all airlines. If the clock didn’t start until each individual entity was injured, the regulation would never become final. There would always be someone new who could challenge it.

Marc: That makes sense, because if I’m starting a new business, then I’m starting a business in the framework and in the environment in which the industry is being regulated.

Gwen: This really is like coming to the nuisance doctrine, right, where there’s some level of finality.

Marc: Yes. For decades, courts had said that once six years passes, the regulation is settled, industries have adjusted, the agency has moved on, everybody’s built compliance systems around it. Like the airport. At some point, the neighborhood has to accept that it’s there and just recognize that there will be noises, there will be pollution, and there will be shaking of buildings that go on.

Gwen: Right. Unless we’re talking about Corner Post.

Marc: Okay. Tell me about Corner Post. What actually happened here?

Gwen: In 2011, the Federal Reserve issued a regulation about interchange fees. Those are the fees that merchants pay whenever you swipe a credit card.

Marc: I know merchants hate those, right?

Gwen: Yeah, they do. And so Congress told the Fed to make sure the fees were reasonable and proportional. The Fed issued a rule, and then merchants immediately challenged it, saying that the Fed had set the fees too high.

Marc: But then what happened?

Gwen: The merchants lost. The D.C. Circuit said that the Fed’s interpretation was reasonable. That was in 2013. So under the old understanding, the rule was originally issued in 2011, but the six-year window would have closed in 2017. We’re done.

Marc: Okay, done and dusted. That should have been the end of it.

Gwen: It should have. Under the old understanding, it was. Anyone who wanted to challenge it had until 2017. After that, the rule was final. But then what happened? In this case, in 2018, seven years after the rule is issued, a truck stop in North Dakota called Corner Post was founded. And in 2021, they sued the Federal Reserve over the same rule.

Marc: Ten years after the rule was initially issued.

Gwen: Ten years, yes. But the government said, you’re too late. The statute of limitations expired in 2017. Corner Post said, no, we weren’t even in existence in 2017. We weren’t injured by the rule until we started to accept credit cards. So the clock should start when we were harmed, not when the rule was issued.

Marc: And the Supreme Court bought this.

Gwen: Six to three. Justice Barrett wrote for the majority. And here, read this part.

Marc: A plaintiff’s claim does not accrue until he has the right to assert it. That is, until he has standing. And because the regulation doesn’t injure a plaintiff until it’s applied to him, he does not obtain standing to challenge it until then.

Gwen: The court here has tied accrual to standing. You can’t sue until you have standing, and you don’t have standing until you’re injured, and you’re not injured until the regulation actually affects you. Therefore, the clock doesn’t start until you’re personally affected. Here’s the next line. This is the part that makes the majority’s rule sound intuitive.

Marc: A plaintiff cannot sue before he is injured, so the limitations clock cannot begin before that injury exists.

Gwen: On its face, this seems straightforward. Of course, you can’t sue until you’re injured. But applying that tidy principle to regulations that govern entire national markets is a very different thing. That’s where the trouble starts. Here, read this.

Marc: Starting the clock at issuance conflicts with basic accrual principles.

Gwen: The court’s saying we can’t do it the way we have been doing because that would conflict with these principles. But what the court is calling these basic accrual principles were designed for individual lawsuits between private parties, not for nationwide regulatory programs that millions of people are relying on. That’s the category error at the heart of this case.

Marc: The logic is clean, but the consequence is here that no regulation is ever truly final. There will always be new entities coming into existence.

Gwen: This is a major problem.

Marc: Then a regulation from 1995 can be challenged right now. We can form a company today and sue five years from now to try and strike down the regulation.

Gwen: I mean, that seems like a really massive problem for a government that depends so much on regulatory agencies to do its business.

Marc: It really is.

Gwen: That brings us back to the airport.

Marc: Okay. Let’s imagine that the airport has been there for 50 years. My new neighbor moves in. He sues. Property law would say, tough luck. You came to the nuisance.

Gwen: Here, property law would protect settled expectations. The airport invested a ton of money in the operation. The other neighbors have adjusted to it. Presumably, these houses are cheaper because they are near the airport. The community developed based on this assumption. You don’t get to show up late, buy something really cheaply and then destroy what made it cheap in the first place.

Marc: But Corner Post says that the regulatory version works the opposite way.

Gwen: Yes, the exact opposite. Here, if the EPA issues an air quality rule in 2010, everyone affected challenges it in 2011. By 2017, the challenges are done. The window has closed. And at this point, industries are investing billions building compliance programs. States are incorporating the rule into their implementation plans. People are hopefully breathing cleaner air and making life decisions based on that. The entire regulatory neighborhood is settled around this rule.

Marc: Then we form a new LLC. It’s subject to the rule, and Corner Post says that LLC gets to sue just as if the rule came out yesterday. They get six years from the date they’re formed.

Gwen: That is exactly like the new neighbor suing the airport.

Marc: Yes, it’s exactly like that. The new entity is coming to the regulatory nuisance and demanding it be shut down. All the reliance interests, all the investments made, all the planning done, all the settled expectations can be upended by a single plaintiff who didn’t even exist when the rule was issued.

Gwen: What did the dissent say in Corner Post?

Marc: Jackson wrote the dissent. She was joined by the two other liberal justices. And she doesn’t mince words. Here’s what she has to say.

Marc: The court’s decision today will unleash chaos. From this day forward, federal regulations, no matter how longstanding, are destined to be continuously subject to legal attack. Indeed, the majority’s ruling all but guarantees that for every rule on the books, some newly formed entity will challenge it within six years of its creation. The result is a regulatory Wild West.

Gwen: And then—

Marc: Nothing in the statute compels the majority’s reading and everything in the administrative state counsels against it.

Gwen: Regulatory Wild West. I mean, that is a pretty stark description.

Marc: It is. The point is simple. The majority’s rule isn’t required by the text. And it will destabilize everything that all of these regulations have created in long settled expectations. No regulation will ever be settled. No rule is ever safe. And agencies have to be prepared to defend everything forever.

Gwen: I really like the last part of the quote because it shows that she’s thinking about the real world effects of these opinions.

Marc: I would say that a lot of these recent opinions, like the ones we’ve been talking about, read a little like Originalism 101. They would probably say, yeah, that sounds right. They’re applying these basic, solid originalism principles. But when we say 101 after something, we don’t really mean that’s the truth. We mean it’s the clean, elegant theory you teach in the first week of class.

Gwen: Statute of limitations protect plaintiff’s right to sue. Regulations that violate the law are void from the beginning. If something’s illegal, it doesn’t matter how long ago it happened.

Marc: And like so much that we’ve talked about in this podcast, the administrative state was not inflexible. But it seems that the court is operating from the premise that the administrative state has this rigidity about it that is always going to be harmful to potential owners or business owners.

Gwen: Yes. So viewing it in this simplistic way is potentially correct in the same way that saying supply and demand determines prices is correct in Econ 101.

Marc: Yes, that’s true, but it is really wildly insufficient once we start adding in market failures, information asymmetries, externalities, regulatory capture, monopoly power. Basically all the things that actually matter in the real world.

Gwen: So Originalism 101 says that these illegal rules are void ab initio, void from the beginning. But that ignores decades of settled expectations, billions of dollars in reliance, and entire industries structured around the existence of the rule.

Marc: Essentially, the court is applying a first-year law school principle to a regulatory regime. And acting like that’s really rigorous legal reasoning. The majority opinion reads like a clean hypothetical. But Corner Post isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a debt collection rule that had been in place for a decade.

Gwen: And now some restaurant in North Dakota gets to blow it all up because they didn’t like the 4% surcharge on the Visa.

Marc: Yes, which they would have been aware of when they were thinking about, is this an economic business to go into?

Gwen: But that’s exactly what the court said, because in Originalism 101, all that matters is whether the rule is legal now. Reliance? Stability? The practical reality that our economy can’t function if every rule is perpetually vulnerable to challenge, those aren’t in the textbook. The rule challenged in Corner Post was recent, but many others have been part of the societal fabric for decades.

Marc: It’s like teaching someone to do laundry by showing them how to add the soap and then being shocked when you end up with a bunch of tiny pink sweaters.

Gwen: Yes. So you taught them one simple and critical step. You do need to add soap to do laundry, but you left out a lot of other stuff. You might want to sort by color, check the temperature, read the care labels, don’t put wool in the dryer. All the things you would actually need to know to do laundry successfully.

Marc: Yes. The court really loves originalism here. They’re saying they’re going back to what the founders intended, back to these first principles. And there’s something intellectually satisfying about it. It feels pure. It feels uncomplicated.

Gwen: That’s what makes this particularly frustrating. The court acts like it’s being rigorous and principled by sticking to the basics. We’re just following the text. We’re not making policy. But ignoring context is a choice. Ignoring consequences is a choice.

Marc: So what they’re calling neutral interpretation is actually—

Gwen: A specific interpretive philosophy that prioritizes textual simplicity over functional reality. Yes, and now it means that 40-year-old regulations can be challenged as if they were issued yesterday.

Marc: Okay, here’s what I’m wondering. Corner Post by itself seems bad for regulatory stability. But we just spent the last episode talking about how Loper Bright killed Chevron deference. What happens when you put these two together?

Gwen: That is a really important question because the answer is that the effects multiply.

Marc: How?

Gwen: Under the old system, the EPA could have issued a regulation in 2005. Industry challenges it. A lot of the time, if there were multiple lawsuits, they would have been consolidated. The court would have ruled. The court probably applied Chevron at the time. If the statute was ambiguous, it deferred. The agency won. The rule was upheld in 2006, and the six-year clock ran out in 2011. This was done, final, and settled.

Marc: Chevron then protected the interpretation, and the statute of limitations protected the finality.

Gwen: Yes, and now both protections are gone. A new company formed today can challenge that 2005 rule. And when they do, the court doesn’t ask, is EPA’s interpretation reasonable? It asks, what do I personally think the best reading of the statute is? The court’s deciding for itself.

Marc: Again, this is the court, unelected officials in the third branch of government choosing to read or potentially read it differently than what the regulatory experts, in theory, backed up by the election process of the president, would read it.

Gwen: Yes, they’re doing it separated in time, separated in judicial philosophy. This is completely different. A regulation that almost certainly would have been upheld as reasonable under Chevron could easily be struck down today as not the best reading under Loper Bright.

Marc: The same regulation literally can be litigated twice and lose the second time.

Gwen: Not just can be, will be. And the majority’s view of this is really straightforward.

Marc: The government’s concerns about finality and reliance cannot alter the statute Congress enacted.

Gwen: They’re saying here that finality isn’t the point. Stability isn’t the point. Reliance isn’t the point. The only thing that matters is the words that Congress wrote, even if that means that decades-old regulations are never truly settled. This is not a normal way to run a regulatory system. If an industry lost under Chevron and the regulations still cost them money, they have every incentive to try again. And to do that, they just need to form a new entity and bring the challenge in a new circuit and let the court evaluate it de novo.

Marc: Let’s try a different analogy. This is sort of like if you’re playing golf and you have unlimited mulligans. You can always drop the ball wherever you want to drop the ball. You can hit the ball from whatever point you want to hit it until you get the ball in the hole that you’re aiming for.

Gwen: Yeah. That’s really what the court has set up for industry here.

Gwen: We’ve talked about what this means for the people reliant on the regulations, but this also has a major impact on the agency. Under the old system, once a rule had been litigated and settled, the agency could go on and work on other issues. They could focus on new problems. They could allocate resources to new priorities. Now, every rule they’ve ever issued is potentially back on the table. They might be defending regulations from the Clinton administration brought using today’s judicial standards. We might be relitigating drug approval frameworks from the 1990s.

Marc: This sounds like it would completely overwhelm agency legal offices. And let me just say, sounds extremely expensive for the government.

Gwen: Yes, it absolutely does. Agencies have limited resources. So if they’re constantly defending these old regulations, they can’t write new ones. They can’t respond to emerging problems. They’re just playing defense forever. And here’s how the court addressed this issue.

Marc: If Congress wishes to provide a different limitations rule for regulatory actions, it must say so.

Gwen: Courts often do this. If you don’t like what we’re saying, you, Congress, can just make a new rule. And this honestly would actually be a very easy rule for Congress to change. Here they’re just interpreting the statute. There’s no concern about a separation of powers here. They could fix this issue. But there is no need for the court to even set the issue up to begin with.

Marc: You mentioned industries trying again. Can they actually create plaintiffs on purpose?

Gwen: Oh, absolutely. If you’re a trade association, you challenged a regulation in 2011 and lost. The six-year window closed in 2017. Under the old rules, that was the end. But now—

Marc: Now you form a new LLC or subsidiary or holding company. That entity is formed after 2017. It gets a fresh clock.

Gwen: That seems like a pretty obvious loophole.

Marc: It is. The court could see this was potentially going to happen. So it said that courts should be skeptical of shell plaintiffs. But how do you prove that? You can create a real business that is doing real things, but that was still strategically formed to challenge a rule.

Gwen: If you have enough money. You can fund new plaintiffs forever. Individuals and small businesses can’t do this, but major industries with billions at stake, why would they not?

Marc: Okay, I just realized something. If you’re creating a new entity to challenge a regulation, you then get to decide where that entity is located.

Gwen: Yeah. Now we’re adding to the problems here. And so now you’re not just creating a new plaintiff, you’re forum shopping the court you want to litigate your issue in.

Marc: Yes. Corner Post supercharged this issue. So if the D.C. Circuit upheld an EPA regulation 20 years ago and generally, 20 years ago, virtually all of this litigation would have been going through the D.C. Circuit. That was the end of the story. The D.C. Circuit is the expert circuit on administrative law and their decision settled it. But now—

Gwen: Yeah. Now, who cares what the D.C. Circuit said? You create a new entity in Texas. You file in the Fifth Circuit. You get a completely different set of judges who are likely to see things very differently than the judges did 20 years ago.

Marc: And the Fifth Circuit isn’t bound by what the D.C. Circuit decided.

Gwen: No, not at all. Circuit courts only bind themselves. The circuit can look at the exact same regulation, the exact same statute, and reach the completely opposite conclusion. And now, thanks to Corner Post, you can have almost a dozen more bites of the apple wherever you want. Just form a new entity in the right jurisdiction.

Marc: We could end up with different circuits reaching different conclusions about the same federal regulation.

Gwen: Yes, and we already do sometimes. But Corner Post will make this so much worse. Before, there was at least the six-year window, and when that closed, we had some sense of finality. Challenges often got consolidated. The D.C. Circuit handled most regulatory cases. There’s predictability. Now you can just shop for your favorite circuit indefinitely.

Marc: And what does that mean practically?

Gwen: It means that regulations will be valid in some parts of the country and invalid in others. It means companies in different states will be playing by different rules. It means regulatory chaos.

Marc: And I assume certain circuits are known for being more skeptical of agency power.

Gwen: Yes. If you’re challenging most regulations right now, you’re probably not filing in the D.C. Circuit or the Ninth Circuit. You’re thinking maybe Fifth Circuit, maybe Eleventh. Courts that have been a lot more aggressive about trying to limit agency authority. But there are issues where it’s predominantly more liberal attorneys challenging the agency action, particularly immigration is the first one that comes to mind. So for those, we’d probably be looking at more like the Ninth or the Fourth.

Marc: Okay. The combination is create a new entity to reset the clock, locate that entity strategically to pick your court. And then argue under Loper Bright that the court should decide the best reading of the statute for itself without deferring to the agency. You have stacked every advantage in favor of yourself.

Gwen: I mean, kudos to them. That’s a pretty sophisticated playbook.

Marc: Yes, it is. And it’s going to fragment regulatory law in ways that no one has ever seen before. The whole point of this federal regulatory scheme was supposed to be uniformity. We had one set of rules for the entire country. Corner Post plus forum shopping threatens that in a fundamental way.

Gwen: We might end up with a patchwork of different regulations effectively applying in different parts of the country.

Marc: We will. Unless and until the Supreme Court theoretically could resolve that at some point, but most things never make it there. In the meantime, nobody will know what the actual rules should be.

Gwen: And the airport analogy again, except now the newcomer gets to pick which judge decides whether the airport can operate or not.

Marc: And they’re going to pick a judge who hates airports.

Gwen: All right, let’s make this a little more concrete. We’ve tried to do some examples, but this means that any new power plant can challenge air quality rules. Any new factory can challenge water pollution limits. Basically, anything that’s regulated could be destabilized.

Marc: Yes. Health and safety regulations for cars, labor rules about overtime, immigration regulations, energy efficiency standards, school lunch nutrition. This is everywhere. I mean, everything that really basically governs our basic lives is up for grabs depending on where you live and depending on who’s challenging it.

Gwen: So then my morning coffee is covered by administrative law.

Marc: Same thing with the nutrition label on your yogurt, the safety standards on your car’s brakes, the accessibility requirements at your gym, the rules about what your health insurance has to cover. And all of that now is perpetually up for grabs.

Gwen: Yes. All we need to do is form a new entity that’s injured by the rules and they can sue. It doesn’t matter if the rule is three years old or 30.

Marc: OK, so let me see if I can summarize how all these pieces fit together. So we have Corner Post, Loper Bright and the Major Questions Doctrine we talked about a few episodes ago.

Gwen: Yes.

Marc: So Major Questions Doctrine says agencies can’t decide issues of vast economic and political significance unless Congress clearly authorized it. That’s a substantive limit on what agencies can do.

Gwen: Right.

Marc: Loper Bright says courts don’t defer to agency interpretations anymore. They decide the best reading of the statute themselves. That changes how courts evaluate agency action.

Gwen: Correct.

Marc: And now Corner Post says new entities can challenge old regulations as if they were just issued. That changes when agency action can be challenged.

Gwen: Yes, you’ve got it.

Marc: Okay, so you’ve got stricter substantive limits on what agencies can do, less favorable judicial review when they’re challenged, and perpetual vulnerability to new challenges all at the same time.

Gwen: Yes, these effects multiply. Under the old system, even if an agency made an interpretation a judge didn’t love, it could still potentially survive Chevron deference and be protected by the statute of limitations. Now there’s no Chevron safety net and no time-based safety net. These doctrines compound. More substantive vulnerability times less judicial deference times perpetual exposure to challenge equals chaos.

Marc: What Corner Post then represents is that any new entity can challenge any regulation, no matter how old it is or how long, as long as they can show that they themselves suffered an injury.

Gwen: Yes, the clock resets for each new plaintiff.

Marc: And regulations are never final.

Gwen: Never. The coming to the regulatory nuisance doctrine, except this time the newcomer gets to pick a judge specialized to help them bulldoze the airport.

Marc: And combined with Loper Bright and the Major Questions Doctrine, agencies are dramatically weaker. Courts are more powerful. Regulations are more vulnerable. Finality is gone. Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you feel about regulation. You can probably guess how I feel about it. But this is undeniably a massive shift.

Gwen: And it feels like it would be apropos to quote Ghostbusters at this time.

Marc: Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Gwen: Yes. This brings us to the end of season one of Administrative Remedies.

Marc: It’s been quite the journey. We’ve learned a lot. When we started, I’m not sure I fully appreciated how much administrative law actually shapes my life.

Gwen: That’s the whole point. We wanted to give people the foundation they need to actually understand what’s happening when they hear about these agencies, the regulations, and all the Supreme Court cases in the news related to them.

Marc: OK, let’s recap. When we started, we started with why agencies exist in the first place. Congress can’t regulate airline safety and drug approvals and workplace conditions all by itself.

Gwen: We talked about delegation, how Congress gives agencies authority and the constitutional limits on that authority. Using the babysitter analogy over and over and over.

Marc: We covered rulemaking, how agencies actually create the regulations that affect everything from nutrition labels on your food to the emissions of your car.

Gwen: We explored independent agencies, why some regulators have historically been insulated from presidential control and why that matters for things like interest rates and market stability.

Marc: And then the big recent cases, the Major Questions Doctrine, Chevron and its death in Loper Bright, and now Corner Post.

Gwen: Yes. And together, these cases represent the biggest shift in administrative law in, I would really say, ever. Potentially, we could accept the rise of the agencies in the 30s and 40s, but in that situation, agencies were expanding, but the law was quite stable, as we talked about previously. What changed was just the role agencies played in regulating what was going on in the country. Now, courts are more powerful, agencies are more constrained, and the rules that govern all of these parts of your daily life that we could list yet again ad nauseam are more vulnerable to challenge than they’ve been in generations.

Marc: Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. You need to understand it to actually have an informed opinion. And that’s what this season was about, giving you the vocabulary, the concepts, and the framework to follow what’s happening and form your own views.

Gwen: Okay, so what happens next?

Marc: We’re going to take a few weeks off, catch our breath, let you catch up on any episodes you might have missed.

Gwen: And when we come back, in season two, we’re going to dive deep into adjudication. This is how agencies act like courts. When you appeal a Social Security denial or challenge an immigration decision or fight an SEC enforcement action, you’re in an administrative adjudication. It’s a whole different world from rulemaking with its own procedures, its own judges, and its own controversies.

Marc: Administrative law judges, due process, the right to a hearing. All of it. And there are some major Supreme Court cases in there, too. But that’s for next season.

Gwen: For now, we want to thank everyone who’s been listening. We started this podcast because we believe you can’t fix what you don’t understand. And we hope that now you understand a lot more about how the administrative state actually works and why it matters.

Marc: If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with someone who’s trying to make sense of this all. Leave us a review and we’ll see you in a few weeks for season two. I’m Gwen Savitz.

Gwen: And I’m Marc Roark.

Marc: Thank you for listening to Administrative Remedies. See you next season.

Marc: So that does it for today’s episode on Administrative Remedies. Thank you for joining us today. Please, if you enjoy this podcast and enjoy this episode, give us a like on Spotify, iTunes, or whatever platform you’re listening on. And be sure to tune in next time where we’ll continue to dive into the contours of administrative law, because remember, you can’t fix what you don’t understand.

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