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After decades of debate, the lines of distinction between textualism and purposivism have been carefully drawn with respect to the judicial task of statutory interpretation. Far less attention has been devoted to the question of how executive branch officials approach statutory interpretation. While scholars have contrasted agencies' interpretive practices from those of courts, they have not yet developed a theory of agency statutory interpretation. This Article develops a purposivist theory of agency statutory interpretation on the ground that regulatory statutes oblige agencies to implement the statutes they administer in that manner. Regulatory statutes not only grant powers but also impose a duty on agencies to carry out those powers in accordance with the principles or purposes the statutes establish. To comply with that duty, agencies must develop a conception of the purposes that the statute requires them to pursue and select a course of action that best carries forward those purposes within the means permitted by the statute; in short, agencies must take a purposivist approach. Moreover, this Article argues that agencies' institutional capacities—a familiar constellation of expertise, indirect political accountability, and ability to vet proposals before adopting them—make them ideally suited to carry out the task of purposive interpretation. Understanding agency interpretation as purposive by statutory design has significant implications for long-standing debates. First, it suggests that the focus of judicial review should be on the agency's specification of the statute's purposes and chosen means to implement those purposes, questions that are not squarely addressed by the Chevron doctrine. Second, by providing an account of the character of the agency's statutory duties, this analysis helps to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate political and presidential influences on the agency. Finally, investigating the debate between purposivism and textualism beyond the courts exposes a renewed ...

This Article argues that the principle relied upon in King v. Burwell that courts "cannot interpret statutes to negate their stated purposes"-the enacted purposes canon-is and should be viewed as a bedrock element of statutory interpretation. The Supreme Court has relied upon this principle for decades, but it has done so in ways that do not call attention to this interpretive choice. As a result, the scope and patterns of the Court's reliance are easy to miss. After reconstructing the Court's practice, this Article defends this principle of interpretation on analytic, normative, and pragmatic grounds. Building on jurisprudence showing that when a rule states its own justification the meaning of the rule changes, this Article argues that enacted purposes change the range of permissible readings of a statute. The Article also argues that the enacted purposes canon has beneficial consequences because it requires courts to prioritize the most public-regarding elements of legislation. The canon, moreover, represents a point of agreement between textualist and purposivist approaches to statutory interpretation. Based on the Court's long reliance and positive justification, it is time to acknowledge the enacted purposes canon. Recognition of the enacted purposes canon matters to administrative law and legislation. The enacted purposes canon applies in review of administrative agency action to prevent agencies from adopting interpretations inconsistent with their statutes' enacted purposes-an implication with particular importance when the president's policies are in tension with some of the enacted purposes in legislation. This analysis also exposes how conventional guidance on legislative drafting misses the critical feature of enacted purpose provisions: the way they entrench policy. Finally, and most importantly, attention to enacted purposes serves as a reminder that our federal legislation is a messy accumulation of individual statutes, with their own purposes, not a formal code.

Should courts interpret the Constitution as they interpret statutes? This question has been answered in a wide variety of ways. On the one hand, many scholars and jurists understand constitutional and statutory interpretation as largely overlapping, continuous, or converging. For some, this overlap follows directly from the Constitution's status as a form of legislated law. In this way of thinking, because the Constitution, like a statute, was bargained over and formally adopted, it should be interpreted in accordance with general principles applicable to legislated law. Proponents of this view argue that if constitutional interpretation appears distinctive in practice, that is because it involves the application "of usual principles" to "an unusual text," not because special principles apply. For others, the commonality between constitutional and statutory interpretation follows from more general commitments about the character of law. The premise, for instance, that the fundamental imperative for courts is to make decisions-whether constitutional, statutory, or common law-that align with contemporary values renders constitutional, statutory, and common law methodology continuous.

Debates over administrative agencies' reliance on guidance documents have largely neglected the most authoritative source of guidance about the meaning of agency regulations: their preambles. This Article examines and defends the guidance function of preambles. Preambles were designed not only to provide the agency's official justification for the regulations they introduce, but also to offer guidance about the regulation's meaning and application. Today, preambles include extensive guidance ranging from interpretive commentary to application examples. Based on the place of preamble guidance as part of the agency's formal explanation of the regulation and the rigorous internal agency vetting which accompanies that formal role, this Article argues that preamble guidance has greater authority than other forms of guidance. That greater authority has important implications. Under current judicial doctrine, preamble guidance warrants greater deference than other forms of guidance. Preamble guidance's superiority also grounds the agency's obligation to act consistently with it—and to revise preamble guidance only in documents issued by the agency, as opposed to lower-level officials, with the same publicity as the original preamble. This obligation should be expressly adopted as a form of internal administrative law either by individual agencies or central executive branch regulators.

This Essay offers a specification of the rule of law's demands of administrative law and government inspired by Professor Peter L. Strauss's scholarship. It identifies five principles—authorization, notice, justification, coherence, and procedural fairness—which provide a framework for an account of the rule of law's demands of administrative governance. Together these principles have intriguing results for the evaluation of administrative law. On the one hand, they reveal rule-of-law foundations for some contested positions, such as a restrictive view of the President's power to direct subordinate officials and giving weight to an agency's determination of the scope of its own authority. On the other hand, these rule-of-law principles expose some long-established practices as having troublesome foundations, such as the settled doctrine that agencies need not justify their choice of policymaking form. Consideration of these principles in the context of administrative law and government ultimately shows—like so much of Professor Strauss's work—the many ways in which government under law ultimately depends on officials taking the rule of law as their highest-order commitment.

This essay — part of a special journal issue on Legislation and Regulation and Regulatory State courses as core elements of the law school curriculum — approaches the debate over adopting these courses by looking back to the controversy stirred by teaching administrative law in law schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. This essay argues that sources of resistance to administrative law at that time not only help to explain the slow pace of adoption of "Leg-Reg" and "Reg-State" courses today, but also inform what material these new courses should cover. At the turn of the century, both commitment to the case method as the exclusive pedagogy for law teaching and jurisprudential principles that understood courts to be the privileged sources of law resulted in early administrative law courses being normalized within the case method, excluding the internal law and decisionmaking of administrative agencies from their coverage. Based on the premise that law students should confront the primary sources of law in our current regulatory legal system, first-year Leg-Reg and Reg-State courses should not replicate the traditional, exclusive focus on judicial decisions. Rather, these new courses are the right occasion to introduce regulatory and congressional materials as primary sources. That coverage choice, moreover, provides preparation for an upper-level administrative law course focused on how courts review agency action, while minimizing duplication in coverage. Even more importantly, treatment of nonjudicial primary sources in these new courses helps to bring the image of law conveyed to first year students closer to the true dimensions of our legal order.

After decades of debate, the lines of distinction between textualism and purposivism have been carefully drawn with respect to the judicial task of statutory interpretation. Far less attention has been devoted to the question of how executive branch officials approach statutory interpretation. While scholars have contrasted agencies' interpretive practices from those of courts, they have not yet developed a theory of agency statutory interpretation. This Article develops a purposivist theory of agency statutory interpretation on the ground that regulatory statutes oblige agencies to implement the statutes they administer in that manner. Regulatory statutes not only grant powers but also impose a duty on agencies to carry out those powers in accordance with the principles or purposes the statutes establish. To comply with that duty, agencies must develop a conception of the purposes that the statute requires them to pursue and select a course of action that best carries forward those purposes within the means permitted by the statute; in short, agencies must take a purposivist approach. Moreover, this Article argues that agencies' institutional capacities — a familiar constellation of expertise, indirect political accountability, and ability to vet proposals before adopting them — make them ideally suited to carry out the task of purposive interpretation. Understanding agency interpretation as purposive by statutory design has significant implications for long-standing debates. First, it suggests that the focus of judicial review should be on the agency's specification of the statute's purposes and chosen means to implement those purposes, questions that are not squarely addressed by the Chevron doctrine. Second, by providing an account of the character of the agency's statutory duties, this analysis helps to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate political and presidential influences on the agency. Finally, investigating the debate between purposivism and textualism beyond the courts exposes a ...

Separation of powers has a new endeavor. The PCAOB decision makes the validity of good-cause removal protections depend on the separation of adjudicative from policymaking and enforcement functions within the agency. At a minimum, within independent agencies, it preserves the second layer of removal protection only for dedicated adjudicators. But its logic extends further. In PCAOB, the demand for political supervision over rulemaking and enforcement trumped Congress's choice to preserve the independence of officials who perform those roles and also adjudicate. In that way, PCAOB reversed the consistent constitutional validation of good-cause removal protections for those who engage in adjudication. While PCAOB might well be confined to two (or greater) levels of good-cause removal protection, it has the potential to restructure the constitutional footing for agencies with a single level of good-cause removal protection, preserving that protection for dedicated adjudicators but casting it aside for agencies with more than just adjudicative functions.