Noah Rosenblum

@narosenblum.bsky.social

20760 Followers 1629 Following

Associate Professor @NYULaw (but views are not my employer’s) | Legal History, Administrative State, New York State Courts | “agenda-driven naysayer whose head instantiates academic ethers”

Propaganda dispatch from the Social Security Administration praising Trump.
§ 199. As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. - When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own / ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.
1 Associate Professors of Law, Columbia Law School and NYU School of Law, respectively. For helpful comments and conversations, thanks to Ash Ahmed, Sam Bagenstos, Nick Bednar, Christine Billy, Emily Bremer, Blake Emerson, Seth Frotman, Don Goodson, Jill Hasday, Chris Havasy, Matt Lawrence, Nicholas Parrillo, Sabeel Rahman, Shalev Roisman, Bijal Shah, Glen Staszewski, and James Tierney, as well as participants in the Administering a Democratic Political Economy conference at Yale Law School, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, the New Voices in Administrative Law Roundtable at Notre Dame Law School, the Public Law Workshop at the University of Minnesota Law School, the Faculty Workshop at Michigan State Law, and the Reimagining Administrative Law Initiative at UCLA Law. Special thanks to Josh Macey for reviewing this chapter for this volume. For excellent research assistance, thanks to Nathaniel Berman, Isaac Buck, Miranda Litwak, Sami Stafford, Nathaniel Thompson, and Isabelle Wechsler.
These examples illustrate that different political economies might recommend different administrative rules. Even if the aim of administrative law is the same- ensuring that agencies engage in reasoned decision-making-different political economies countenance different standards.
This chapter argues that, as we move forward, we should abandon the one- size-fits-all model of administrative law that has dominated the field for the past half-century. This approach has erased differences in political economy, reduced administrative efficiency, and compounded existing inequalities of wealth and power. A better approach would be pluralist. It would start from the premise that optimal legal processes and institutional structures should vary depending on the specific characteristics of regulated activities and actors. Supplying the economy with the right amount of money, 4 for example, is a very different challenge from reducing air pollution, evaluating asylum applications,6 or combatting unfair methods of competition.? Administrative law should recognize and even center these substantive differences.
"I get people who see it as sounding crazy," said Kostas Moros, a director at the Second Amendment Foundation. "But that's what we agreed to. If it's not tied to that original meaning, then it means nothing at all."
Headline about second case of screwworm in Texas
Headline about second case of screwworm in Texas
A delicious whole smoked whitefish
†* William T. Comfort III Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. For comments and conversation, the authors would like to thank Michael Asimow, Aditya Bamzai, Emily Bremer, Adam Cox, Dan Deacon, Abbe Gluck, Jeannie Fromer, Emma Kaufman, Nina Mendelson, Jonas Monast, Bernie Meyler, Anne Joseph O'Connell, Arti Rai, and Chris Walker. Thanks also to participants at the ABA Administrative Law Conference, the National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars, the Duke Law Journal Administrative Law Symposium, and faculty workshops at NYU, Fordham, and Tulane. Special thanks to Pieter Brower, Nathan Gimness, Nathaniel Thompson, Isabelle Wechsler, and Fiona Yip for fantastic research assistance, and to George Elsesser, Ava Erfani, Meghan Hodges, and the rest of the wonderful team at DLJ for superlative editing. The research on which this article is based was supported by the Filomen D'Agostino Research Fund at NYU School of Law, for which we are extremely grateful.
The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the "two-way street" that defines the administrative state, where subordinate officials routinely shape and constrain the decisions of their superiors through their expertise and exercise of statutory authority. Part II analyzes Arthrex itself, contrasting minimalist and maximalist interpretations of the decision and showing how both readings are ultimately unsatisfactory. In particular, this Part brings out the incompatibility of the most intuitive reading of Arthrex with the two-way administrative state described in Part I. Part III attempts a reconciliation. It develops a proposed middle course, based on the policy-administration distinction, which harmonizes presidential control with bureaucratic autonomy across a range of contexts, from civil service protections to advisory committee independence to intergovernmental arrangements. By recovering and updating Taft's and his peers' insights about the distinct domains of policy and administration, this Article aims to preserve the valuable features of the modern administrative state while respecting Arthrex's vision of democratic accountability through presidential oversight. The policy-administration framework provides courts with manageable standards for determining when presidential control is constitutionally required, while avoiding the wholesale transformation of administrative governance that a maximalist reading of Arthrex would entail.
PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION AFTER ARTHREX NOAH A. ROSENBLUM† & RODERICK M. HILLS, JR. †1 ABSTRACT The federal government employs over 2 million civilian workers, all but a few thousand of whom enjoy forms of tenure and insulation from presidential control. This bureaucracy, sometimes called "the administrative state," is organized in a many-layered structure defined by statutes and regulations. Pursuant to law and court decisions, the administrative state routinely makes findings of fact, policy determinations, and conclusions of law, sometimes independent of the president. The Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Arthrex risks unsettling this arrangement. It adopts a simplistic, hierarchical vision of bureaucratic organization, which is frankly incompatible with existing statutes and regulations. This Article proceeds on the theory that, nevertheless, the Court did not intend to overthrow the government. It offers alternative readings of Arthrex—narrow and broad—to show how the case undermines the existing law of agency design. It then shows how a middle road could reconcile presidentialism with the Constitution, statutory law, and bureaucracy, enabling the Court to advance presidential administration without abandoning traditional principles of administrative law.
Mr. Jacobson tapped his phone on a conference table. "It's on the app," he said. In a year he had wagered about $4.46 million on DraftKings and FanDuel accounts, two of the nation's leading online sports betting sites, according to investigators.
CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Trying to Save the Soul of America 1 Julian E. Zelizer 2 The Red and the Blue Endure 15 Julian E. Zelizer 3 Antagonists and Enablers: The Tragic Dance of Biden and the Supremes 29 John Fabian Witt 4 Between the Nightmare and the Noble Dream: The Ideal of Department of Justice Independence in a Time of Hyperpartisanship 52 Noah A. Rosenblum Checked Ambition: The Biden Economic Agenda 70 Sean H. Vanatta 6 Unrequited Labor: The Biden Administration's Failure to Win Over Working-Class America 92 Michael Kazin 7 Energy, Climate, and the Environment 104 Paul Sabin 8 After the Fall of Roe: The Biden Presidency and Reproductive Policy 123 Mary Ziegler
“He stated as indispensable conditions of a settlement: the restoration of the authority of the United States over the whole of the State, and the cessation of hostilities by the disbanding of the army, and that there shall be no receding on the pat of the Executive from his position on the slavery question. The latter proposition was explained to mean that the Executive action on the subject of slavery, so far as it had been declared in messages, proclamations and other official acts, must pass for what they were worth; that he would not receded from his position. But that this would not debar action by other authorities of the government.”
The Adaptability Paradox raises a profound and challenging question about the way the Constitution works. Steve uses that question to retell the history of American government as the shift between a series of different settlements, which has only recently broken down. I wonder, though, whether the book suggests a different historical account, one that emphasizes not consensus, but dissensus. In this way, his book points us towards a new approach to Constitutional theory—and new historical and political projects that would go with it.
Sign showing wait times for subway of 15 minutes and 19 minutes
Email from Provost alerting me that she has signed my promotion and tenure docket
A Political Earthquake Rattles the North Carolina Legislature Voters across this politically purple state made it clear on Tuesday that they wanted to punish the powerful on both sides of the aisle. It may be a warning to incumbents elsewhere.
Snowy morning in Brooklyn after the storm
From the financial times: “It is still statistically true in America that there are Christians in any random group. Recently we saw soldiers gathered around a man they held pros-trate. They beat him first. If Christ appears to us in this moment, he is not among the executioners.” Marilynne Robinson's most recent books are the novel "Jack' and 'Reading Genesis'
Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., its officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm's parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people's papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.
Subway ad advertising NYC’s childcare success: Peace of Mind Delivered By NYC A record high 150,000 children enrolled in more affordable early childhood education programs A seat offered to every child applying to 3-K on time (first time in NYC history) Out-of-pocket costs for child care subsidies reduced from $55 to 55 per week That's New York City's agencies delivering for you. Every day. Everywhere. Every day.
The departures - including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief - represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February. At that time, five leaders and supervisors of the department's Public Integrity Section, which investigates public officials for possible corruption, resigned rather than comply with an appointee of President Donald Trump's orders to dismiss the bribery case against then-New York mayor Eric Adams.
But the data suggests that in the 13 appellate courts, there is increasingly such a thing as a Trump judge. The president's appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. Ninety-two percent of their total votes were in favor of the administration. That figure far outstrips support for Mr. Trump's agenda from appeals court judges appointed by other Republican presidents, and from Mr. Trump's appointees to the district courts.
"No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country," said one private equity investor who specialises in energy.
I keep hearing the anti-war protesters chant, "No blood for oil! No blood for oil!" But what they never seem to say is exactly how much oil we're talking about. Don't you think that's pertinent information? Are we talking a gallon of oil for every 10 gallons of blood? Or is it more like 30 gallons of oil for every pint of blood? Because if it's the latter, maybe a blood-oil exchange would be a good idea. In the first Gulf War, roughly 300 brave Americans lost their lives. Assuming that each of these soldiers shed an average of eight pints of blood, that works out to roughly a pint of American blood shed per 60 million barrels of Kuwaiti crude saved from the clutches of Saddam. If you ask me, that's a pretty darn good deal. If we can manage to swing a similar trade this time around, then I say, "Bombs away." We should also know what kind of blood we're giving up. Is it O-positive, the universal donor? I'd be more reluctant to part with that than some useless AB junk.
Profile of a voter from NYTimes "Things are going great." Matthew Dugie 60, Mesa, Ariz. Dugie, a construction worker, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, but is now largely happy with Trump's approach to his second term.
NY Times Headline that reads: Zero Hour for the Middle East After more than a decade of wars, in Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, the region is exhausted by conflict. Is it ready to find another way?
Excerpt from oral argument in Slaughter case reading: “which everybody can agree, that if there's one thing we know about the founders, it's that they wanted powers separated. They wanted the executive, the legislative, the judicial. They didn't want them all in one place. They wanted them separated across the government, across the different branches. Easy enough to agree with, right? GENERAL SAUER: I agree, with an important caveat that the Court said in Seila Law that the one, you know, sort of exception to all this division was the presidency itself, where the Framers consciously adopted a unified and energetic executive. JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, that's not a caveat.”
A list of some of Christine’s fantastic articles on unitary executive theory
2026 Free Entrance Days in the National Parks Come experience the national parks! All National Park Service sites that charge an entrance fee will offer free admission to everyone (other fees, including timed entry or reservation fees, may apply). Mark your calendar for these entrance fee-free dates: • February 16: Presidents Day (Washington's Birthday) • May 25: Memorial Day • June 14: Flag Day/President Trump's birthday
Table of contents of the brief
Drawing on recent research and scholarship, this brief challenges the premise that the reliance of Humphrey's Executor on the categories of quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial decision-making rendered that unanimous opinion erroneous and poorly reasoned. Far from handwaving and obfuscation, these terms were part of this country's law long before Humphrey's Executor. Rooted in distinctions drawn by the Founders, including James Madison in the First Congress, the taxonomy was developed throughout the nineteenth century at both the state and federal levels, and provided jurists with a coherent framework to address separation of powers issues. Numerous pre-Humphrey's Executor sources reveal that quasi-legislative agencies, as understood at the time, held the power to create binding rules and regulations, and quasi-judicial bodies adjudicated specific disputed. Because these functions were not purely executive, they called for a degree of independence from executive control.
Cover page of brief of Rosenblum and Donahue in Slaughter
"When I read now that we're weaponizing, l feel like I'm being gaslit. Because we're doing exactly the opposite," Blanche said.
Trump Officials to Cut Flights at 40 Major Airports if Shutdown Continues The plan, which officials said was intended to help air traffic controllers, could force the cancollation of thousande of flichta
The excesses of Mr. Trump's second term force his opponents to adopt an experimental attitude toward government design that reinvents rather than restores our institutions. It is a reminder of the progressive movement, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries featured a similar attitude about Americans' relationship to the federal government. But the efforts by Mr. Trump also require reckoning with the mistakes of the progressive era and its aftermath.
Emboldened by the lapse in government funding and employee furloughs, some visitors are brazenly betting that they won't get caught for breaking the law.
Poster for October 30 event on John Witt’s book at NYU Law
Poster advertising John Witt book event.
Al Overview Evaluating and ranking people on physical attractiveness is highly subjective and inappropriate. What one person finds attractive, another may not. Physical beauty is also not a measure of a person's worth or character. For Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau, recent news has reported on their personal relationship, with sources indicating that they find each other attractive. Objectifying people and comparing them based on their looks is harmful and can be linked to negative social consequences, such as insecurity and reduced self-esteem.
What they rely on is fear. So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we're actually not that afraid. It also dismantles their narrative a little bit. When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn," it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it's, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.
In a statement, Mr. Bovino said, "The former Acting US Attorney's email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the Constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement."
It's a simple recipe, really: a scorching economic message delivered by political outsiders standing up to the powerful. The villains in this narrative — and it's essential to have villains — are the elites at the top of a broken system. Neither Mr. Mamdani nor Mr. Osborn dwelled on cultural issues; instead, they concentrated on subjects like increasing wages and affording a home. Although their signature positions have strong public backing, their platforms are more than just a grab bag of whatever does best in the polls. They tell a story that reframes the debate, enlisting voters in a battle between the many and the few, with stakes that reach into everyday life.
Dear Colleagues; On behalf of the ABA Administrative Law Section's Annual Scholarship Award Committee, I am happy to announce the winner of the 2024 ABA Administrative Law Section Annula Scholarship Award. Professors Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, and Noah Rosenblum's article, The Making of Presidential Administration, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 2131 (2024), was selected for the Section's 2025 Annual Scholarship Award, recognizing the best work published in administrative law during 2024.
Text of footnote 14 (too long for alt text)
DISAGREEMENT AND HISTORICAL ARGUMENT OR HOW NOT TO THINK ABOUT REMOVAL Andrea Scoseria Katz, Noah A. Rosenblum, and Jane Manners ABSTRACT Scholars have debated the reach of the President's power to remove government officers for over one hundred years. This old fight is now suddenly urgent as President Trump asserts far-reaching powers to control the federal bureaucracy and the Supreme Court transforms Unitary Executive Theory into caselaw. Yet the scholarly case for an indefeasible presidential removal power has never been weaker. This Essay continues an ongoing conversation about how to read some critical early republic evidence about removal. It briefly recapitulates the stakes of the disagreement before offering in-depth analyses of developments in Pennsylvania removal practice, including a reading of the Council of Censors' Report from 1784. Along the way, it responds to some recent criticisms of our work by Professors Saikrishna Prakash and Aditya Bamzai. The Essay makes two overarching arguments: First, there was no consensus in the early republic that the executive power included an indefeasible power of removal. Second, legal historians must take dissensus seriously. Historical disagreement is a fact that lawyers wishing to make legal meaning out of history need to confront. In this case, it straightforwardly undermines the notion there was a shared understanding in the early republic that the executive power included an indefeasible power of removal.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is considering a run for either the Senate or the presidency in 2028.
Headline describing Mamdani as holding “anti-police positions” in 2022.
Firmament of Glass, by Vievee Francis Morning, the glistening grass draws me into the day, as if new meant separate from the day before and I, having that human part that can be transfixed by bauble or blade, limp out again, a believer, into memory's emerald glint.
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This critique isn't about ideology. It's about winning.
Off-print of History and Fetishism in the New Separation of Powers Formalism, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review
Importantly, in this scheme, separation of powers did not operate as a shibboleth; it was always functional.19 Separation of powers accomplished specific goals, and its ultimate goal was the creation of a complete government. But in fulfilling that goal, separating powers helped secure liberty. Keeping those goals in mind helps make sense of the flexibility of separation of powers in the early republic. In some cases, creating a complete government while securing liberty might require a firm division of powers, but in other cases not. The guiding question would be what arrangement would best advance the twin goals of completeness and security. Within this worldview, maintaining a formalistic separation of powers for its own sake would have seemed a foolish rigidity.