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Over a decade ago I was involved in a group project that focused on developing a regulatory model concerning the implementation of the precautionary principle in the EU. The project involved a number of workshops and in those workshops I used to joke about the fact that while there were many different frameworks being produced to represent risk regulation, these diagrams basically fell into two different categories. In the first category there were those diagrams that characterised risk regulation as a linear process involving usually a scientific process of risk assessment and then political processes of risk management and risk communication. In the second category there were those diagrams that had lots of looping arrows going all over the place that represented the fact that risk regulation was an iterative process that constantly involved many scientific, socio-political and other inputs.Behind my joking was a sense of hope. The linear diagrams did have their minimalist appeal, but the messy diagrams captured much of the reality of this area of regulatory practice.

Climate change litigation is an obsessive preoccupation for many legal scholars. Three different "narratives" can be identified for why scholars find such litigation important to study: litigation is a response to institutional failure, legal reasoning holds authority, and litigation is a forum for the co‐production of facts and social orders. The nature and consequences of these narratives are considered in the context of the first U.S. Supreme Court "climate change" case—Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). This analysis has implications for both how scholars understand their expertise in this area, and how they should foster it.

This book, by two of the world's leading administrative law scholars, reimagines administrative law as the law of public administration by making its competence the focus of administrative law. Grounded in extensive interdisciplinary, historical, and doctrinal analysis, Fisher and Shapiro show why understanding both the capacity and authority of expert public administration is crucial to ensure the legitimacy and accountability of the administrative state. To address the current precarious state of administrative law, they support a new study of the administrative process by an Attorney Generals Committee on Administrative Procedure leading to a revised Administrative Procedure Act (APA). This book is a must-read for anyone interested in administrative law and its reform.

The state we are in -- Expert administrative capacity -- Administrative accountability -- Enlightened foundations -- Debating administrative law : from the spoils system to the new deal -- The emergence of administrative law and the limits of legal imagination -- The narrowing of the administrative law imagination -- Administrative competence and the Chevron doctrine -- Hard look review -- Conclusion : towards an enlightened administrative law.

The role of generalist courts in reviewing the work of expert agencies is generally portrayed as either an institutional necessity on the one hand or a Pandora's Box on the other. Courts are expected to ensure the accountability of agency actions through their legal oversight role, yet on matters of science policy they do not have the expertise of the agencies nor can they allow themselves to become amateur policymakers in the course of their review. Given these challenges, we set out to better understand what courts are doing in their review of agency science. We conducted a qualitative examination of the courts' review of challenges to agency scientific choices in the entire set of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Our study revealed an increasingly rigorous and substantive engagement in the courts' review of scientific challenges to the EPA's NAAQS over time that tracked the Agency's own progress in developing rigorous analytical approaches. Our findings, albeit preliminary, suggest the emergence of a constructive partnership between the courts and agencies in science policy in NAAQS cases. In overseeing scientific challenges, the courts appear to serve as a necessary irritant, encouraging the agency to develop much stronger administrative governance and deliberative decisions on complex science-policy issues. Conversely, in developing stronger decisionmaking processes, the resulting agency efforts have a reciprocal, positive impact on the courts' own standards for review. The courts and agencies thus appear to work symbiotically through their mutual efforts on the establishment of rigorous analytical yardsticks to guide the decision process. While our findings may be limited to the NAAQS, which likely present a best case in administrative process, the findings may still offer a grounded, normative model for imagining a constructive and even vital role for generalist courts in technically complex areas of social decision making. ; The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business