Archives For separation of powers

Will Montesquieu Rescue Antitrust?

Jonathan M. Barnett — 25 August 2020

In an age of antitrust populism on both ends of the political spectrum, federal and state regulators face considerable pressure to deploy the antitrust laws against firms that have dominant market shares. Yet federal case law makes clear that merely winning the race for a market is an insufficient basis for antitrust liability. Rather, any plaintiff must show that the winner either secured or is maintaining its dominant position through practices that go beyond vigorous competition. Any other principle would inhibit the competitive process that the antitrust laws are designed to promote. Federal judges who enjoy life tenure are far more insulated from outside pressures and therefore more likely to demand evidence of anticompetitive practices as a predicate condition for any determination of antitrust liability.

This separation of powers between the executive branch, which prosecutes alleged infractions of the law, and the judicial branch, which polices the prosecutor, is the simple genius behind the divided system of government generally attributed to the eighteenth-century French thinker, Montesquieu. The practical wisdom of this fundamental principle of political design, which runs throughout the U.S. Constitution, can be observed in full force in the current antitrust landscape, in which the federal courts have acted as a bulwark against several contestable enforcement actions by antitrust regulators.

In three headline cases brought by the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission since 2017, the prosecutorial bench has struck out in court. Under the exacting scrutiny of the judiciary, government litigators failed to present sufficient evidence that a dominant firm had engaged in practices that caused, or were likely to cause, significant anticompetitive effects. In each case, these enforcement actions, applauded by policymakers and commentators who tend to follow “big is bad” intuitions, foundered when assessed in light of judicial precedent, the factual record, and the economic principles embedded in modern antitrust law. An ongoing suit, filed by the FTC this year after more than 18 months since the closing of the targeted acquisition, exhibits similar factual and legal infirmities.

Strike 1: The AT&T/Time-Warner Transaction

In response to the announcement of AT&T’s $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, the DOJ filed suit in 2017 to prevent the formation of a dominant provider in home-video distribution that would purportedly deny competitors access to “must-have” content. As I have observed previously, this theory of the case suffered from two fundamental difficulties.

First, content is an abundant and renewable resource so it is hard to see how AT&T+TW could meaningfully foreclose competitors’ access to this necessary input. Even in the hypothetical case of potentially “must-have” content, it was unclear whether it would be economically rational for post-acquisition AT&T regularly to deny access to other distributors, given that doing so would imply an immediate and significant loss in licensing revenues without any clearly offsetting future gain in revenues from new subscribers.

Second, home-video distribution is a market lapsing rapidly into obsolescence as content monetization shifts from home-based viewing to a streaming environment in which consumers expect “anywhere, everywhere” access. The blockbuster acquisition was probably best understood as a necessary effort to adapt to this new environment (already populated by several major streaming platforms), rather than an otherwise puzzling strategy to spend billions to capture a market on the verge of commercial irrelevance.

Strike 2: The Sabre/Farelogix Acquisition

In 2019, the DOJ filed suit to block the $360 million acquisition of Farelogix by Sabre, one of three leading airline booking platforms, on the ground that it would substantially lessen competition. The factual basis for this legal diagnosis was unclear. In 2018, Sabre earned approximately $3.9 billion in worldwide revenues, compared to $40 million for Farelogix. Given this drastic difference in market share, and the almost trivial share attributable to Farelogix, it is difficult to fathom how the DOJ could credibly assert that the acquisition “would extinguish a crucial constraint on Sabre’s market power.”

To use a now much-discussed theory of antitrust liability, it might nonetheless be argued that Farelogix posed a “nascent” competitive threat to the Sabre platform. That is: while Farelogix is small today, it may become big enough tomorrow to pose a threat to Sabre’s market leadership.

But that theory runs straight into a highly inconvenient fact. Farelogix was founded in 1998 and, during the ensuing two decades, had neither achieved broad adoption of its customized booking technology nor succeeded in offering airlines a viable pathway to bypass the three major intermediary platforms. The proposed acquisition therefore seems best understood as a mutually beneficial transaction in which a smaller (and not very nascent) firm elects to monetize its technology by embedding it in a leading platform that seeks to innovate by acquisition. Robust technology ecosystems do this all the time, efficiently exploiting the natural complementarities between a smaller firm’s “out of the box” innovation with the capital-intensive infrastructure of an incumbent. (Postscript: While the DOJ lost this case in federal court, Sabre elected in May 2020 not to close following similarly puzzling opposition by British competition regulators.)

Strike 3: FTC v. Qualcomm

The divergence of theories of anticompetitive risk from market realities is vividly illustrated by the landmark suit filed by the FTC in 2017 against Qualcomm.

The litigation pursued nothing less than a wholesale reengineering of the IP licensing relationships between innovators and implementers that underlie the global smartphone market. Those relationships principally consist of device-level licenses between IP innovators such as Qualcomm and device manufacturers and distributors such as Apple. This structure efficiently collects remuneration from the downstream segment of the supply chain for upstream firms that invest in pushing forward the technology frontier. The FTC thought otherwise and pursued a remedy that would have required Qualcomm to offer licenses to its direct competitors in the chip market and to rewrite its existing licenses with device producers and other intermediate users on a component, rather than device, level.

Remarkably, these drastic forms of intervention into private-ordering arrangements rested on nothing more than what former FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen once appropriately called a “possibility theorem.” The FTC deployed a mostly theoretical argument that Qualcomm had extracted an “unreasonably high” royalty that had potentially discouraged innovation, impeded entry into the chip market, and inflated retail prices for consumers. Yet these claims run contrary to all available empirical evidence, which indicates that the mobile wireless device market has exhibited since its inception declining quality-adjusted prices, increasing output, robust entry into the production market, and continuous innovation. The mismatch between the government’s theory of market failure and the actual record of market success over more than two decades challenges the policy wisdom of disrupting hundreds of existing contractual arrangements between IP licensors and licensees in a thriving market.

The FTC nonetheless secured from the district court a sweeping order that would have had precisely this disruptive effect, including imposing a “duty to deal” that would have required Qualcomm to license directly its competitors in the chip market. The Ninth Circuit stayed the order and, on August 11, 2020, issued an unqualified reversal, stating that the lower court had erroneously conflated “hypercompetitive” (good) with anticompetitive (bad) conduct and observing that “[t]hroughout its analysis, the district court conflated the desire to maximize profits with an intent to ‘destroy competition itself.’” In unusually direct language, the appellate court also observed (as even the FTC had acknowledged on appeal) that the district court’s ruling was incompatible with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp., which strictly limits the circumstances in which a duty to deal can be imposed. In some cases, it appears that additional levels of judicial review are necessary to protect antitrust law against not only administrative but judicial overreach.

Axon v. FTC

For the most explicit illustration of the interface between Montesquieu’s principle of divided government and the risk posed to antitrust law by cases of prosecutorial excess, we can turn to an unusual and ongoing litigation, Axon v. FTC.

The HSR Act and Post-Consummation Merger Challenges

The HSR Act provides regulators with the opportunity to preemptively challenge acquisitions and related transactions on antitrust grounds prior to those transactions having been consummated. Since its enactment in 1976, this statutory innovation has laudably increased dealmakers’ ability to close transactions with a high level of certainty that regulators would not belatedly seek to “unscramble the egg.” While the HSR Act does not foreclose this contingency since regulatory failure to challenge a transaction only indicates current enforcement intentions, it is probably fair to say that M&A dealmakers generally assume that regulators would reverse course only in exceptional circumstances. In turn, the low prospect of after-the-fact regulatory intervention encourages the efficient use of M&A transactions for the purpose of shifting corporate assets to users that value those assets most highly.

The FTC’s Belated Attack on the Axon/Vievu Acquisition

Dealmakers may be revisiting that understanding in the wake of the FTC’s decision in January 2020 to challenge the acquisition of Vievu by Axon, each being a manufacturer of body-worn camera equipment and related data-management software for law enforcement agencies. The acquisition had closed in May 2018 but had not been reported through HSR since it fell well below the reportable deal threshold. Given a total transaction value of $7 million, the passage of more than 18 months since closing, and the insolvency or near-insolvency of the target company, it is far from obvious that the Axon acquisition posed a material competitive risk that merits unsettling expectations that regulators will typically not challenge a consummated transaction, especially in the case of what is a micro-sized nebula in the M&A universe.

These concerns are heightened by the fact that the FTC suit relies on a debatably narrow definition of the relevant market (body-camera equipment and related “cloud-based” data management software for police departments in large metropolitan areas, rather than a market that encompassed more generally defined categories of body-worn camera equipment, law enforcement agencies, and data management services). Even within this circumscribed market, there are apparently several companies that offer related technologies and an even larger group that could plausibly enter in response to perceived profit opportunities. Despite this contestable legal position, Axon’s court filing states that the FTC offered to settle the suit on stiff terms: Axon must agree to divest itself of the Vievu assets and to license all of Axon’s pre-transaction intellectual property to the buyer of the Vievu assets. This effectively amounts to an opportunistic use of the antitrust merger laws to engage in post-transaction market reengineering, rather than merely blocking an acquisition to maintain the pre-transaction status quo.

Does the FTC Violate the Separation of Powers?

In a provocative strategy, Axon has gone on the offensive and filed suit in federal district court to challenge on constitutional grounds the long-standing internal administrative proceeding through which the FTC’s antitrust claims are initially adjudicated. Unlike the DOJ, the FTC’s first stop in the litigation process (absent settlement) is not a federal district court but an internal proceeding before an administrative law judge (“ALJ”), whose ruling can then be appealed to the Commission. Axon is effectively arguing that this administrative internalization of the judicial function violates the separation of powers principle as implemented in the U.S. Constitution.

Writing on a clean slate, Axon’s claim is eminently reasonable. The fact that FTC-paid personnel sit on both sides of the internal adjudicative process as prosecutor (the FTC litigation team) and judge (the ALJ and the Commissioners) locates the executive and judicial functions in the hands of a single administrative entity. (To be clear, the Commission’s rulings are appealable to federal court, albeit at significant cost and delay.) In any event, a court presented with Axon’s claim—as of this writing, the Ninth Circuit (taking the case on appeal by Axon)—is not writing on a clean slate and is most likely reluctant to accept a claim that would trigger challenges to the legality of other similarly structured adjudicative processes at other agencies. Nonetheless, Axon’s argument does raise important concerns as to whether certain elements of the FTC’s adjudicative mechanism (as distinguished from the very existence of that mechanism) could be refined to mitigate the conflicts of interest that arise in its current form.

Conclusion

Antitrust vigilance certainly has its place, but it also has its limits. Given the aspirational language of the antitrust statutes and the largely unlimited structural remedies to which an antitrust litigation can lead, there is an inevitable risk of prosecutorial overreach that can betray the fundamental objective to protect consumer welfare. Applied to the antitrust context, the separation of powers principle mitigates this risk by subjecting enforcement actions to judicial examination, which is in turn disciplined by the constraints of appellate review and stare decisis. A rich body of federal case law implements this review function by anchoring antitrust in a decisionmaking framework that promotes the public’s interest in deterring business practices that endanger the competitive process behind a market-based economy. As illustrated by the recent string of failed antitrust suits, and the ongoing FTC litigation against Axon, that same decisionmaking framework can also protect the competitive process against regulatory practices that pose this same type of risk.

Correcting the Federalist Society Review’s Mischaracterization of How to Regulate

Thom Lambert — 9 July 2018

Ours is not an age of nuance. It’s an age of tribalism, of teams—“Yer either fer us or agin’ us!” Perhaps I should have been less surprised, then, when I read the unfavorable review of my book How to Regulate in, of all places, the Federalist Society Review.

I had expected some positive feedback from reviewer J. Kennerly Davis, a contributor to the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project. The “About” section of the Project’s website states:

In the ultra-complex and interconnected digital age in which we live, government must issue and enforce regulations to protect public health and safety. However, despite the best of intentions, government regulation can fail, stifle innovation, foreclose opportunity, and harm the most vulnerable among us. It is for precisely these reasons that we must be diligent in reviewing how our policies either succeed or fail us, and think about how we might improve them.

I might not have expressed these sentiments in such pro-regulation terms. For example, I don’t think government should regulate, even “to protect public health and safety,” absent (1) a market failure and (2) confidence that systematic governmental failures won’t cause the cure to be worse than the disease. I agree, though, that regulation is sometimes appropriate, that government interventions often fail (in systematic ways), and that regulatory policies should regularly be reviewed with an eye toward reducing the combined costs of market and government failures.

Those are, in fact, the central themes of How to Regulate. The book sets forth an overarching goal for regulation (minimize the sum of error and decision costs) and then catalogues, for six oft-cited bases for regulating, what regulatory tools are available to policymakers and how each may misfire. For every possible intervention, the book considers the potential for failure from two sources—the knowledge problem identified by F.A. Hayek and public choice concerns (rent-seeking, regulatory capture, etc.). It ends up arguing:

for property rights-based approaches to environmental protection (versus the command-and-control status quo);
for increased reliance on the private sector to produce public goods;
that recognizing property rights, rather than allocating usage, is the best way to address the tragedy of the commons;
that market-based mechanisms, not shareholder suits and mandatory structural rules like those imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, are the best way to constrain agency costs in the corporate context;
that insider trading restrictions should be left to corporations themselves;
that antitrust law should continue to evolve in the consumer welfare-focused direction Robert Bork recommended;
against the FCC’s recently abrogated net neutrality rules;
that occupational licensure is primarily about rent-seeking and should be avoided;
that incentives for voluntary disclosure will usually obviate the need for mandatory disclosure to correct information asymmetry;
that the claims of behavioral economics do not justify paternalistic policies to protect people from themselves; and
that “libertarian-paternalism” is largely a ruse that tends to morph into hard paternalism.

Given the congruence of my book’s prescriptions with the purported aims of the Regulatory Transparency Project—not to mention the laundry list of specific market-oriented policies the book advocates—I had expected a generally positive review from Mr. Davis (whom I sincerely thank for reading and reviewing the book; book reviews are a ton of work).

I didn’t get what I’d expected. Instead, Mr. Davis denounced my book for perpetuating “progressive assumptions about state and society” (“wrongheaded” assumptions, the editor’s introduction notes). He responded to my proposed methodology with a “meh,” noting that it “is not clearly better than the status quo.” His one compliment, which I’ll gladly accept, was that my discussion of economic theory was “generally accessible.”

Following are a few thoughts on Mr. Davis’s critiques.

Are My Assumptions Progressive?

According to Mr. Davis, my book endorses three progressive concepts:

(i) the idea that market based arrangements among private parties routinely misallocate resources, (ii) the idea that government policymakers are capable of formulating executive directives that can correct private ordering market failures and optimize the allocation of resources, and (iii) the idea that the welfare of society is actually something that exists separate and apart from the individual welfare of each of the members of society.

I agree with Mr. Davis that these are progressive ideas. If my book embraced them, it might be fair to label it “progressive.” But it doesn’t. Not one of them.

Market Failure

Nothing in my book suggests that “market based arrangements among private parties routinely misallocate resources.” I do say that “markets sometimes fail to work well,” and I explain how, in narrow sets of circumstances, market failures may emerge. Understanding exactly what may happen in those narrow sets of circumstances helps to identify the least restrictive option for addressing problems and would thus would seem a pre-requisite to effective policymaking for a conservative or libertarian. My mere invocation of the term “market failure,” however, was enough for Mr. Davis to kick me off the team.

Mr. Davis ignored altogether the many points where I explain how private ordering fixes situations that could lead to poor market performance. At the end of the information asymmetry chapter, for example, I write,

This chapter has described information asymmetry as a problem, and indeed it is one. But it can also present an opportunity for profit. Entrepreneurs have long sought to make money—and create social value—by developing ways to correct informational imbalances and thereby facilitate transactions that wouldn’t otherwise occur.

I then describe the advent of companies like Carfax, AirBnb, and Uber, all of which offer privately ordered solutions to instances of information asymmetry that might otherwise create lemons problems. I conclude:

These businesses thrive precisely because of information asymmetry. By offering privately ordered solutions to the problem, they allow previously under-utilized assets to generate heretofore unrealized value. And they enrich the people who created and financed them. It’s a marvelous thing.

That theme—that potential market failures invite privately ordered solutions that often obviate the need for any governmental fix—permeates the book. In the public goods chapter, I spend a great deal of time explaining how privately ordered devices like assurance contracts facilitate the production of amenities that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. In discussing the tragedy of the commons, I highlight Elinor Ostrom’s work showing how “groups of individuals have displayed a remarkable ability to manage commons goods effectively without either privatizing them or relying on government intervention.” In the chapter on externalities, I spend a full seven pages explaining why Coasean bargains are more likely than most people think to prevent inefficiencies from negative externalities. In the chapter on agency costs, I explain why privately ordered solutions like the market for corporate control would, if not precluded by some ill-conceived regulations, constrain agency costs better than structural rules from the government.

Disregarding all this, Mr. Davis chides me for assuming that “markets routinely fail.” And, for good measure, he explains that government interventions are often a bigger source of failure, a point I repeatedly acknowledge, as it is a—perhaps the—central theme of the book.

Trust in Experts

In what may be the strangest (and certainly the most misleading) part of his review, Mr. Davis criticizes me for placing too much confidence in experts by giving short shrift to the Hayekian knowledge problem and the insights of public choice.

a. The Knowledge Problem

According to Mr. Davis, the approach I advocate “is centered around fully functioning experts.” He continues:

This progressive trust in experts is misplaced. It is simply false to suppose that government policymakers are capable of formulating executive directives that effectively improve upon private arrangements and optimize the allocation of resources. Friedrich Hayek and other classical liberals have persuasively argued, and everyday experience has repeatedly confirmed, that the information needed to allocate resources efficiently is voluminous and complex and widely dispersed. So much so that government experts acting through top down directives can never hope to match the efficiency of resource allocation made through countless voluntary market transactions among private parties who actually possess the information needed to allocate the resources most efficiently.

Amen and hallelujah! I couldn’t agree more! Indeed, I said something similar when I came to the first regulatory tool my book examines (and criticizes), command-and-control pollution rules. I wrote:

The difficulty here is an instance of a problem that afflicts regulation generally. At the end of the day, regulating involves centralized economic planning: A regulating “planner” mandates that productive resources be allocated away from some uses and toward others. That requires the planner to know the relative value of different resource uses. But such information, in the words of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, “is not given to anyone in its totality.” The personal preferences of thousands or millions of individuals—preferences only they know—determine whether there should be more widgets and fewer gidgets, or vice-versa. As Hayek observed, voluntary trading among resource owners in a free market generates prices that signal how resources should be allocated (i.e., toward the uses for which resource owners may command the highest prices). But centralized economic planners—including regulators—don’t allocate resources on the basis of relative prices. Regulators, in fact, generally assume that prices are wrong due to the market failure the regulators are seeking to address. Thus, the so-called knowledge problem that afflicts regulation generally is particularly acute for command-and-control approaches that require regulators to make refined judgments on the basis of information about relative costs and benefits.

That was just the first of many times I invoked the knowledge problem to argue against top-down directives and in favor of market-oriented policies that would enable individuals to harness local knowledge to which regulators would not be privy. The index to the book includes a “knowledge problem” entry with no fewer than nine sub-entries (e.g., “with licensure regimes,” “with Pigouvian taxes,” “with mandatory disclosure regimes”). There are undoubtedly more mentions of the knowledge problem than those listed in the index, for the book assesses the degree to which the knowledge problem creates difficulties for every regulatory approach it considers.

Mr. Davis does mention one time where I “acknowledge[] the work of Hayek” and “recognize[] that context specific information is vitally important,” but he says I miss the point:

Having conceded these critical points [about the importance of context-specific information], Professor Lambert fails to follow them to the logical conclusion that private ordering arrangements are best for regulating resources efficiently. Instead, he stops one step short, suggesting that policymakers defer to the regulator most familiar with the regulated party when they need context-specific information for their analysis. Professor Lambert is mistaken. The best information for resource allocation is not to be found in the regional office of the regulator. It resides with the persons who have long been controlled and directed by the progressive regulatory system. These are the ones to whom policymakers should defer.

I was initially puzzled by Mr. Davis’s description of how my approach would address the knowledge problem. It’s inconsistent with the way I described the problem (the “regional office of the regulator” wouldn’t know people’s personal preferences, etc.), and I couldn’t remember ever suggesting that regulatory devolution—delegating decisions down toward local regulators—was the solution to the knowledge problem.

When I checked the citation in the sentences just quoted, I realized that Mr. Davis had misunderstood the point I was making in the passage he cited (my own fault, no doubt, not his). The cited passage was at the very end of the book, where I was summarizing the book’s contributions. I claimed to have set forth a plan for selecting regulatory approaches that would minimize the sum of error and decision costs. I wanted to acknowledge, though, the irony of promulgating a generally applicable plan for regulating in a book that, time and again, decries top-down imposition of one-size-fits-all rules. Thus, I wrote:

A central theme of this book is that Hayek’s knowledge problem—the fact that no central planner can possess and process all the information needed to allocate resources so as to unlock their greatest possible value—applies to regulation, which is ultimately a set of centralized decisions about resource allocation. The very knowledge problem besetting regulators’ decisions about what others should do similarly afflicts pointy-headed academics’ efforts to set forth ex ante rules about what regulators should do. Context-specific information to which only the “regulator on the spot” is privy may call for occasional departures from the regulatory plan proposed here.

As should be obvious, my point was not that the knowledge problem can generally be fixed by regulatory devolution. Rather, I was acknowledging that the general regulatory approach I had set forth—i.e., the rules policymakers should follow in selecting among regulatory approaches—may occasionally misfire and should thus be implemented flexibly.

b. Public Choice Concerns

A second problem with my purported trust in experts, Mr. Davis explains, stems from the insights of public choice:

Actual policymakers simply don’t live up to [Woodrow] Wilson’s ideal of the disinterested, objective, apolitical, expert technocrat. To the contrary, a vast amount of research related to public choice theory has convincingly demonstrated that decisions of regulatory agencies are frequently shaped by politics, institutional self-interest and the influence of the entities the agencies regulate.

Again, huzzah! Those words could have been lifted straight out of the three full pages of discussion I devoted to public choice concerns with the very first regulatory intervention the book considered. A snippet from that discussion:

While one might initially expect regulators pursuing the public interest to resist efforts to manipulate regulation for private gain, that assumes that government officials are not themselves rational, self-interest maximizers. As scholars associated with the “public choice” economic tradition have demonstrated, government officials do not shed their self-interested nature when they step into the public square. They are often receptive to lobbying in favor of questionable rules, especially since they benefit from regulatory expansions, which tend to enhance their job status and often their incomes. They also tend to become “captured” by powerful regulatees who may shower them with personal benefits and potentially employ them after their stints in government have ended.

That’s just a slice. Elsewhere in those three pages, I explain (1) how the dynamic of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs allows inefficient protectionist policies to persist, (2) how firms that benefit from protectionist regulation are often assisted by “pro-social” groups that will make a public interest case for the rules (Bruce Yandle’s Bootleggers and Baptists syndrome), and (3) the “[t]wo types of losses [that] result from the sort of interest-group manipulation public choice predicts.” And that’s just the book’s initial foray into public choice. The entry for “public choice concerns” in the book’s index includes eight sub-entries. As with the knowledge problem, I addressed the public choice issues that could arise from every major regulatory approach the book considered.

For Mr. Davis, though, that was not enough to keep me out of the camp of Wilsonian progressives. He explains:

Professor Lambert devotes a good deal of attention to the problem of “agency capture” by regulated entities. However, he fails to acknowledge that a symbiotic relationship between regulators and regulated is not a bug in the regulatory system, but an inherent feature of a system defined by extensive and continuing government involvement in the allocation of resources.

To be honest, I’m not sure what that last sentence means. Apparently, I didn’t recite some talismanic incantation that would indicate that I really do believe public choice concerns are a big problem for regulation. I did say this in one of the book’s many discussions of public choice:

A regulator that has both regular contact with its regulatees and significant discretionary authority over them is particularly susceptible to capture. The regulator’s discretionary authority provides regulatees with a strong motive to win over the regulator, which has the power to hobble the regulatee’s potential rivals and protect its revenue stream. The regular contact between the regulator and the regulatee provides the regulatee with better access to those in power than that available to parties with opposing interests. Moreover, the regulatee’s preferred course of action is likely (1) to create concentrated benefits (to the regulatee) and diffuse costs (to consumers generally), and (2) to involve an expansion of the regulator’s authority. The upshot is that that those who bear the cost of the preferred policy are less likely to organize against it, and regulators, who benefit from turf expansion, are more likely to prefer it. Rate-of-return regulation thus involves the precise combination that leads to regulatory expansion at consumer expense: broad and discretionary government power, close contact between regulators and regulatees, decisions that generally involve concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and regular opportunities to expand regulators’ power and prestige.

In light of this combination of features, it should come as no surprise that the history of rate-of-return regulation is littered with instances of agency capture and regulatory expansion.

Even that was not enough to convince Mr. Davis that I reject the Wilsonian assumption of “disinterested, objective, apolitical, expert technocrat[s].” I don’t know what more I could have said.

Social Welfare

Mr. Davis is right when he says, “Professor Lambert’s ultimate goal for his book is to provide policymakers with a resource that will enable them to make regulatory decisions that produce greater social welfare.” But nowhere in my book do I suggest, as he says I do, “that the welfare of society is actually something that exists separate and apart from the individual welfare of each of the members of society.” What I mean by “social welfare” is the aggregate welfare of all the individuals in a society. And I’m careful to point out that only they know what makes them better off. (At one point, for example, I write that “[g]overnment planners have no way of knowing how much pleasure regulatees derive from banned activities…or how much displeasure they experience when they must comply with an affirmative command…. [W]ith many paternalistic policies and proposals…government planners are really just guessing about welfare effects.”)

I agree with Mr. Davis that “[t]here is no single generally accepted methodology that anyone can use to determine objectively how and to what extent the welfare of society will be affected by a particular regulatory directive.” For that reason, nowhere in the book do I suggest any sort of “metes and bounds” measurement of social welfare. (I certainly do not endorse the use of GDP, which Mr. Davis rightly criticizes; that term appears nowhere in the book.)

Rather than prescribing any sort of precise measurement of social welfare, my book operates at the level of general principles: We have reasons to believe that inefficiencies may arise when conditions are thus; there is a range of potential government responses to this situation—from doing nothing, to facilitating a privately ordered solution, to mandating various actions; based on our experience with these different interventions, the likely downsides of each (stemming from, for example, the knowledge problem and public choice concerns) are so-and-so; all things considered, the aggregate welfare of the individuals within this group will probably be greatest with policy x.

It is true that the thrust of the book is consequentialist, not deontological. But it’s a book about policy, not ethics. And its version of consequentialism is rule, not act, utilitarianism. Is a consequentialist approach to policymaking enough to render one a progressive? Should we excise John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty from the classical liberal canon? I surely hope not.

Is My Proposed Approach an Improvement?

Mr. Davis’s second major criticism of my book—that what it proposes is “just the status quo”—has more bite. By that, I mean two things. First, it’s a more painful criticism to receive. It’s easier for an author to hear “you’re saying something wrong” than “you’re not saying anything new.”

Second, there may be more merit to this criticism. As Mr. Davis observes, I noted in the book’s introduction that “[a]t times during the drafting, I … wondered whether th[e] book was ‘original’ enough.” I ultimately concluded that it was because it “br[ought] together insights of legal theorists and economists of various stripes…and systematize[d] their ideas into a unified, practical approach to regulating.” Mr. Davis thinks I’ve overstated the book’s value, and he may be right.

The current regulatory landscape would suggest, though, that my book’s approach to selecting among potential regulatory policies isn’t “just the status quo.” The approach I recommend would generate the specific policies catalogued at the outset of this response (in the bullet points). The fact that those policies haven’t been implemented under the existing regulatory approach suggests that what I’m recommending must be something different than the status quo.

Mr. Davis observes—and I acknowledge—that my recommended approach resembles the review required of major executive agency regulations under Executive Order 12866, President Clinton’s revised version of President Reagan’s Executive Order 12291. But that order is quite limited in its scope. It doesn’t cover “minor” executive agency rules (those with expected costs of less than $100 million) or rules from independent agencies or from Congress or from courts or at the state or local level. Moreover, I understand from talking to a former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is charged with implementing the order, that it has actually generated little serious consideration of less restrictive alternatives, something my approach emphasizes.

What my book proposes is not some sort of governmental procedure; indeed, I emphasize in the conclusion that the book “has not addressed … how existing regulatory institutions should be reformed to encourage the sort of analysis th[e] book recommends.” Instead, I propose a way to think through specific areas of regulation, one that is informed by a great deal of learning about both market and government failures. The best audience for the book is probably law students who will someday find themselves influencing public policy as lawyers, legislators, regulators, or judges. I am thus heartened that the book is being used as a text at several law schools. My guess is that few law students receive significant exposure to Hayek, public choice, etc.

So, who knows? Perhaps the book will make a difference at the margin. Or perhaps it will amount to sound and fury, signifying nothing. But I don’t think a classical liberal could fairly say that the analysis it counsels “is not clearly better than the status quo.”

A Truly Better Approach to Regulating

Mr. Davis ends his review with a stirring call to revamp the administrative state to bring it “in complete and consistent compliance with the fundamental law of our republic embodied in the Constitution, with its provisions interpreted to faithfully conform to their original public meaning.” Among other things, he calls for restoring the separation of powers, which has been erased in agencies that combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and for eliminating unchecked government power, which results when the legislature delegates broad rulemaking and adjudicatory authority to politically unaccountable bureaucrats.

Once again, I concur. There are major problems—constitutional and otherwise—with the current state of administrative law and procedure. I’d be happy to tear down the existing administrative state and begin again on a constitutionally constrained tabula rasa.

But that’s not what my book was about. I deliberately set out to write a book about the substance of regulation, not the process by which rules should be imposed. I took that tack for two reasons. First, there are numerous articles and books, by scholars far more expert than I, on the structure of the administrative state. I could add little value on administrative process.

Second, the less-addressed substantive question—what, as a substantive matter, should a policy addressing x do?—would exist even if Mr. Davis’s constitutionally constrained regulatory process were implemented. Suppose that we got rid of independent agencies, curtailed delegations of rulemaking authority to the executive branch, and returned to a system in which Congress wrote all rules, the executive branch enforced them, and the courts resolved any disputes. Someone would still have to write the rule, and that someone (or group of people) should have some sense of the pros and cons of one approach over another. That is what my book seeks to provide.

A hard core Hayekian—one who had immersed himself in Law, Legislation, and Liberty—might respond that no one should design regulation (purposive rules that Hayek would call thesis) and that efficient, “purpose-independent” laws (what Hayek called nomos) will just emerge as disputes arise. But that is not Mr. Davis’s view. He writes:

A system of governance or regulation based on the rule of law attains its policy objectives by proscribing actions that are inconsistent with those objectives. For example, this type of regulation would prohibit a regulated party from discharging a pollutant in any amount greater than the limiting amount specified in the regulation. Under this proscriptive approach to regulation, any and all actions not specifically prohibited are permitted.

Mr. Davis has thus contemplated a purposive rule, crafted by someone. That someone should know the various policy options and the upsides and downsides of each. How to Regulate could help.

Conclusion

I’m not sure why Mr. Davis viewed my book as no more than dressed-up progressivism. Maybe he was triggered by the book’s cover art, which he says “is faithful to the progressive tradition,” resembling “the walls of public buildings from San Francisco to Stalingrad.” Maybe it was a case of Sunstein Derangement Syndrome. (Progressive legal scholar Cass Sunstein had nice things to say about the book, despite its criticisms of a number of his ideas.) Or perhaps it was that I used the term “market failure.” Many conservatives and libertarians fear, with good reason, that conceding the existence of market failures invites all sorts of government meddling.

At the end of the day, though, I believe we classical liberals should stop pretending that market outcomes are always perfect, that pure private ordering is always and everywhere the best policy. We should certainly sing markets’ praises; they usually work so well that people don’t even notice them, and we should point that out. We should continually remind people that government interventions also fail—and in systematic ways (e.g., the knowledge problem and public choice concerns). We should insist that a market failure is never a sufficient condition for a governmental fix; one must always consider whether the cure will be worse than the disease. In short, we should take and promote the view that government should operate “under a presumption of error.”

That view, economist Aaron Director famously observed, is the essence of laissez faire. It’s implicit in the purpose statement of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project. And it’s the central point of How to Regulate.

So let’s go easy on the friendly fire.

Chevron and the Politicization of Law (or, Chevron Step Three)

Gus Hurwitz — 4 June 2018

A recent exchange between Chris Walker and Philip Hamburger about Walker’s ongoing empirical work on the Chevron doctrine (the idea that judges must defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes) gives me a long-sought opportunity to discuss what I view as the greatest practical problem with the Chevron doctrine: it increases both politicization and polarization of law and policy. In the interest of being provocative, I will frame the discussion below by saying that both Walker & Hamburger are wrong (though actually I believe both are quite correct in their respective critiques). In particular, I argue that Walker is wrong that Chevron decreases politicization (it actually increases it, vice his empirics); and I argue Hamburger is wrong that judicial independence is, on its own, a virtue that demands preservation. Rather, I argue, Chevron increases overall politicization across the government; and judicial independence can and should play an important role in checking legislative abdication of its role as a politically-accountable legislature in a way that would moderate that overall politicization.

Walker, along with co-authors Kent Barnett and Christina Boyd, has done some of the most important and interesting work on Chevron in recent years, empirically studying how the Chevron doctrine has affected judicial behavior (see here and here) as well as that of agencies (and, I would argue, through them the Executive) (see here). But the more important question, in my mind, is how it affects the behavior of Congress. (Walker has explored this somewhat in his own work, albeit focusing less on Chevron than on how the role agencies play in the legislative process implicitly transfers Congress’s legislative functions to the Executive).

My intuition is that Chevron dramatically exacerbates Congress’s worst tendencies, encouraging Congress to push its legislative functions to the executive and to do so in a way that increases the politicization and polarization of American law and policy. I fear that Chevron effectively allows, and indeed encourages, Congress to abdicate its role as the most politically-accountable branch by deferring politically difficult questions to agencies in ambiguous terms.

One of, and possibly the, best ways to remedy this situation is to reestablish the role of judge as independent decisionmaker, as Hamburger argues. But the virtue of judicial independence is not endogenous to the judiciary. Rather, judicial independence has an instrumental virtue, at least in the context of Chevron. Where Congress has problematically abdicated its role as a politically-accountable decisionmaker by deferring important political decisions to the executive, judicial refusal to defer to executive and agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes can force Congress to remedy problematic ambiguities. This, in turn, can return the responsibility for making politically-important decisions to the most politically-accountable branch, as envisioned by the Constitution’s framers.

A refresher on the Chevron debate

Chevron is one of the defining doctrines of administrative law, both as a central concept and focal debate. It stands generally for the proposition that when Congress gives agencies ambiguous statutory instructions, it falls to the agencies, not the courts, to resolve those ambiguities. Thus, if a statute is ambiguous (the question at “step one” of the standard Chevron analysis) and the agency offers a reasonable interpretation of that ambiguity (“step two”), courts are to defer to the agency’s interpretation of the statute instead of supplying their own.

This judicially-crafted doctrine of deference is typically justified on several grounds. For instance, agencies generally have greater subject-matter expertise than courts so are more likely to offer substantively better constructions of ambiguous statutes. They have more resources that they can dedicate to evaluating alternative constructions. They generally have a longer history of implementing relevant Congressional instructions so are more likely attuned to Congressional intent – both of the statute’s enacting and present Congresses. And they are subject to more direct Congressional oversight in their day-to-day operations and exercise of statutory authority than the courts so are more likely concerned with and responsive to Congressional direction.

Chief among the justifications for Chevron deference is, as Walker says, “the need to reserve political (or policy) judgments for the more politically accountable agencies.” This is at core a separation-of-powers justification: the legislative process is fundamentally a political process, so the Constitution assigns responsibility for it to the most politically-accountable branch (the legislature) instead of the least politically-accountable branch (the judiciary). In turn, the act of interpreting statutory ambiguity is an inherently legislative process – the underlying theory being that Congress intended to leave such ambiguity in the statute in order to empower the agency to interpret it in a quasi-legislative manner. Thus, under this view, courts should defer both to this Congressional intent that the agency be empowered to interpret its statute (and, should this prove problematic, it is up to Congress to change the statute or to face political ramifications), and the courts should defer to the agency interpretation of that statute because agencies, like Congress, are more politically accountable than the courts.

Chevron has always been an intensively studied and debated doctrine. This debate has grown more heated in recent years, to the point that there is regularly scholarly discussion about whether Chevron should be repealed or narrowed and what would replace it if it were somehow curtailed – and discussion of the ongoing vitality of Chevron has entered into Supreme Court opinions and the appointments process with increasing frequency. These debates generally focus on a few issues. A first issue is that Chevron amounts to a transfer of the legislature’s Constitutional powers and responsibilities over creating the law to the executive, where the law ordinarily is only meant to be carried out. This has, the underlying concern is, contributed to the increase in the power of the executive compared to the legislature. A second, related, issue is that Chevron contributes to the (over)empowerment of independent agencies – agencies that are already out of favor with many of Chevron’s critics as Constitutionally-infirm entities whose already-specious power is dramatically increased when Chevron limits the judiciary’s ability to check their use of already-broad Congressionally-delegated authority.

A third concern about Chevron, following on these first two, is that it strips the judiciary of its role as independent arbiter of judicial questions. That is, it has historically been the purview of judges to answer statutory ambiguities and fill in legislative interstices.

Chevron is also a focal point for more generalized concerns about the power of the modern administrative state. In this context, Chevron stands as a representative of a broader class of cases – State Farm, Auer, Seminole Rock, Fox v. FCC, and the like – that have been criticized as centralizing legislative, executive, and judicial powers in agencies, allowing Congress to abdicate its role as politically-accountable legislator, abdicating the judiciary’s role in interpreting the law, as well as raising due process concerns for those subject to rules promulgated by federal agencies..

Walker and his co-authors have empirically explored the effects of Chevron in recent years, using robust surveys of federal agencies and judicial decisions to understand how the doctrine has affected the work of agencies and the courts. His most recent work (with Kent Barnett and Christina Boyd) has explored how Chevron affects judicial decisionmaking. Framing the question by explaining that “Chevron deference strives to remove politics from judicial decisionmaking,” they ask whether “Chevron deference achieve[s] this goal of removing politics from judicial decisionmaking?” They find that, empirically speaking, “the Chevron Court’s objective to reduce partisan judicial decision-making has been quite effective.” By instructing judges to defer to the political judgments (or just statutory interpretations) of agencies, judges are less political in their own decisionmaking.

Hamburger responds to this finding somewhat dismissively – and, indeed, the finding is almost tautological: “of course, judges disagree less when the Supreme Court bars them from exercising their independent judgment about what the law is.” (While a fair critique, I would temper it by arguing that it is nonetheless an important empirical finding – empirics that confirm important theory are as important as empirics that refute it, and are too often dismissed.)

Rather than focus on concerns about politicized decisionmaking by judges, Hamburger focuses instead on the importance of judicial independence – on it being “emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” (quoting Marbury v. Madison). He reframes Walker’s results, arguing that “deference” to agencies is really “bias” in favor of the executive. “Rather than reveal diminished politicization, Walker’s numbers provide strong evidence of diminished judicial independence and even of institutionalized judicial bias.”

So which is it? Does Chevron reduce bias by de-politicizing judicial decisionmaking? Or does it introduce new bias in favor of the (inherently political) executive? The answer is probably that it does both. The more important answer, however, is that neither is the right question to ask.

What’s the correct measure of politicization? (or, You get what you measure)

Walker frames his study of the effects of Chevron on judicial decisionmaking by explaining that “Chevron deference strives to remove politics from judicial decisionmaking. Such deference to the political branches has long been a bedrock principle for at least some judicial conservatives.” Based on this understanding, his project is to ask whether “Chevron deference achieve[s] this goal of removing politics from judicial decisionmaking?”

This framing, that one of Chevron’s goals is to remove politics from judicial decisionmaking, is not wrong. But this goal may be more accurately stated as being to prevent the judiciary from encroaching upon the political purposes assigned to the executive and legislative branches. This restatement offers an important change in focus. It emphasizes the concern about politicizing judicial decisionmaking as a separation of powers issue. This is in apposition to concern that, on consequentialist grounds, judges should not make politicized decisions – that is, judges should avoid political decisions because it leads to substantively worse outcomes.

It is of course true that, as unelected officials with lifetime appointments, judges are the least politically accountable to the polity of any government officials. Judges’ decisions, therefore, can reasonably be expected to be less representative of, or responsive to, the concerns of the voting public than decisions of other government officials. But not all political decisions need to be directly politically accountable in order to be effectively politically accountable. A judicial interpretation of an ambiguous law, for instance, can be interpreted as a request, or even a demand, that Congress be held to political account. And where Congress is failing to perform its constitutionally-defined role as a politically-accountable decisionmaker, it may do less harm to the separation of powers for the judiciary to make political decisions that force politically-accountable responses by Congress than for the judiciary to respect its constitutional role while the Congress ignores its role.

Before going too far down this road, I should pause to label the reframing of the debate that I have impliedly proposed. To my mind, the question isn’t whether Chevron reduces political decisionmaking by judges; the question is how Chevron affects the politicization of, and ultimately accountability to the people for, the law. Critically, there is no “conservation of politicization” principle. Institutional design matters. One could imagine a model of government where Congress exercises very direct oversight over what the law is and how it is implemented, with frequent elections and a Constitutional prohibition on all but the most express and limited forms of delegation. One can also imagine a more complicated form of government in which responsibilities for making law, executing law, and interpreting law, are spread across multiple branches (possibly including myriad agencies governed by rules that even many members of those agencies do not understand). And one can reasonably expect greater politicization of decisions in the latter compared to the former – because there are more opportunities for saying that the responsibility for any decision lies with someone else (and therefore for politicization) in the latter than in the “the buck stops here” model of the former.

In the common-law tradition, judges exercised an important degree of independence because their job was, necessarily and largely, to “say what the law is.” For better or worse, we no longer live in a world where judges are expected to routinely exercise that level of discretion, and therefore to have that level of independence. Nor do I believe that “independence” is necessarily or inherently a criteria for the judiciary, at least in principle. I therefore somewhat disagree with Hamburger’s assertion that Chevron necessarily amounts to a problematic diminution in judicial independence.

Again, I return to a consequentialist understanding of the purposes of judicial independence. In my mind, we should consider the need for judicial independence in terms of whether “independent” judicial decisionmaking tends to lead to better or worse social outcomes. And here I do find myself sympathetic to Hamburger’s concerns about judicial independence. The judiciary is intended to serve as a check on the other branches. Hamburger’s concern about judicial independence is, in my mind, driven by an overwhelmingly correct intuition that the structure envisioned by the Constitution is one in which the independence of judges is an important check on the other branches. With respect to the Congress, this means, in part, ensuring that Congress is held to political account when it does legislative tasks poorly or fails to do them at all.

The courts abdicate this role when they allow agencies to save poorly drafted statutes through interpretation of ambiguity.

Judicial independence moderates politicization

Hamburger tells us that “Judges (and academics) need to wrestle with the realities of how Chevron bias and other administrative power is rapidly delegitimizing our government and creating a profound alienation.” Huzzah. Amen. I couldn’t agree more. Preach! Hear-hear!

Allow me to present my personal theory of how Chevron affects our political discourse. In the vernacular, I call this Chevron Step Three. At Step Three, Congress corrects any mistakes made by the executive or independent agencies in implementing the law or made by the courts in interpreting it. The subtle thing about Step Three is that it doesn’t exist – and, knowing this, Congress never bothers with the politically costly and practically difficult process of clarifying legislation.

To the contrary, Chevron encourages the legislature expressly not to legislate. The more expedient approach for a legislator who disagrees with a Chevron-backed agency action is to campaign on the disagreement – that is, to politicize it. If the EPA interprets the Clean Air Act too broadly, we need to retake the White House to get a new administrator in there to straighten out the EPA’s interpretation of the law. If the FCC interprets the Communications Act too narrowly, we need to retake the White House to change the chair so that we can straighten out that mess! And on the other side, we need to keep the White House so that we can protect these right-thinking agency interpretations from reversal by the loons on the other side that want to throw out all of our accomplishments. The campaign slogans write themselves.

So long as most agencies’ governing statutes are broad enough that those agencies can keep the ship of state afloat, even if drifting rudderless, legislators have little incentive to turn inward to engage in the business of government with their legislative peers. Rather, they are freed to turn outward towards their next campaign, vilifying or deifying the administrative decisions of the current government as best suits their electoral prospects.

The sharp-eyed observer will note that I’ve added a piece to the Chevron puzzle: the process described above assumes that a new administration can come in after an election and simply rewrite all of the rules adopted by the previous administration. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this is exactly what administrative law allows (see Fox v. FCC and State Farm). The underlying logic, which is really nothing more than an expansion of Chevron, is that statutory ambiguity delegates to agencies a “policy space” within which they are free to operate. So long as agency action stays within that space – which often allows for diametrically-opposed substantive interpretations – the courts say that it is up to Congress, not the Judiciary, to provide course corrections. Anything else would amount to politically unaccountable judges substituting their policy judgments (this is, acting independently) for those of politically-accountable legislators and administrators.

In other words, the politicization of law seen in our current political moment is largely a function of deference and a lack of stare decisis combined. A virtue of stare decisis is that it forces Congress to act to directly address politically undesirable opinions. Because agencies are not bound by stare decisis, an alternative, and politically preferable, way for Congress to remedy problematic agency decisions is to politicize the issue – instead of addressing the substantive policy issue through legislation, individual members of Congress can campaign on it. (Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with one contemporary example of this: the recent net neutrality CRA vote, which is widely recognized as having very little chance of ultimate success but is being championed by its proponents as a way to influence the 2018 elections.) This is more directly aligned with the individual member of Congress’s own incentives, because, by keeping and placing more members of her party in Congress, her party will be able to control the leadership of the agency which will thus control the shape of that agency’s policy. In other words, instead of channeling the attention of individual Congressional actors inwards to work together to develop law and policy, it channels it outwards towards campaigning on the ills and evils of the opposing administration and party vice the virtues of their own party.

The virtue of judicial independence, of judges saying what they think the law is – or even what they think the law should be – is that it forces a politically-accountable decision. Congress can either agree, or disagree; but Congress must do something. Merely waiting for the next administration to come along will not be sufficient to alter the course set by the judicial interpretation of the law. Where Congress has abdicated its responsibility to make politically-accountable decisions by deferring those decisions to the executive or agencies, the political-accountability justification for Chevron deference fails. In such cases, the better course for the courts may well be to enforce Congress’s role under the separation of powers by refusing deference and returning the question to Congress.

In Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Federalism, Net Neutrality, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market administrative law, Chevron, constitutional political economy, politics, public choice, separation of powers

Foreign Export Cartels, Comity, and the Separation of Powers

Alden Abbott — 15 February 2018

Over the last two decades, the United States government has taken the lead in convincing jurisdictions around the world to outlaw “hard core” cartel conduct. Such cartel activity reduces economic welfare by artificially fixing prices and reducing the output of affected goods and services. At the same, the United States has acted to promote international cooperation among government antitrust enforcers to detect, investigate, and punish cartels.

In 2017, however, the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit (citing concerns of “international comity”) held that a Chinese export cartel that artificially raised the price of vitamin imports into the United States should be shielded from U.S. antitrust penalties—based merely on one brief from a Chinese government agency that said it approved of the conduct. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to review that decision later this year, in a case styled Animal Science Products, Inc., v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. By overturning the Second Circuit’s ruling (and disavowing the overly broad “comity doctrine” cited by that court), the Supreme Court would reaffirm the general duty of federal courts to apply federal law as written, consistent with the constitutional separation of powers. It would also reaffirm the importance of the global fight against cartels, which has reflected consistent U.S. executive branch policy for decades (and has enjoyed strong support from the International Competition Network, the OECD, and the World Bank).

Finally, as a matter of economic policy, the Animal Science Products case highlights the very real harm that occurs when national governments tolerate export cartels that reduce economic welfare outside their jurisdictions, merely because domestic economic interests are not directly affected. In order to address this problem, the U.S. government should negotiate agreements with other nations under which the signatory states would agree: (1) not to legally defend domestic exporting entities that impose cartel harm in other jurisdictions; and (2) to cooperate more fully in rooting out harmful export-cartel activity, wherever it is found.

For a more fulsome discussion of the separation of powers, international relations, and economic policy issues raised by the Animal Science Products case, see my recent Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum entitled The Supreme Court and Animal Science Products: Sovereignty and Export Cartels.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, China, Constitutional Law, Health Care, International, Pharmaceuticals, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market antitrust penalties, comity, export cartels, international competition, international competition network, separation of powers

Congressional Review Act Should Be Used to Strike Down Ill-Advised CFPB Arbitration Rule

Alden Abbott — 12 July 2017

On July 10, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a new rule to ban financial service providers, such as banks or credit card companies, from using mandatory arbitration clauses to deny consumers the opportunity to participate in a class action (“Arbitration Rule”). The Arbitration Rule’s summary explains:

First, the final rule prohibits covered providers of certain consumer financial products and services from using an agreement with a consumer that provides for arbitration of any future dispute between the parties to bar the consumer from filing or participating in a class action concerning the covered consumer financial product or service. Second, the final rule requires covered providers that are involved in an arbitration pursuant to a pre-dispute arbitration agreement to submit specified arbitral records to the Bureau and also to submit specified court records. The Bureau is also adopting official interpretations to the regulation.

The Arbitration Rule’s effective date is 60 days following its publication in the Federal Register (which is imminent), and it applies to contracts entered into more than 180 days after that.

Cutting through the hyperbole that the Arbitration Rule protects consumers from “unfairness” that would deny them “their day in court,” this Rule is in fact highly anti-consumer and harmful to innovation. As Competitive Enterprise Senior Fellow John Berlau put it, in promulgating this Rule, “[t]he CFPB has disregarded vast data showing that arbitration more often compensates consumers for damages faster and grants them larger awards than do class action lawsuits. This regulation could have particularly harmful effects on FinTech innovations, such as peer-to-peer lending.” Moreover, in a coauthored paper, Professors Jason Johnston of the University of Virginia Law School and Todd Zywicki of the Scalia Law School debunked a CFPB study that sought to justify the agency’s plans to issue the Arbitration Rule. They concluded:

The CFPB’s [own] findings show that arbitration is relatively fair and successful at resolving a range of disputes between consumers and providers of consumer financial products, and that regulatory efforts to limit the use of arbitration will likely leave consumers worse off . . . . Moreover, owing to flaws in the report’s design and a lack of information, the report should not be used as the basis for any legislative or regulatory proposal to limit the use of consumer arbitration.

Unfortunately, the Arbitration Rule is just the latest of many costly regulatory outrages perpetrated by the CFPB, an unaccountable bureaucracy that offends the Constitution’s separation of powers and should be eliminated by Congress, as I explained in a 2016 Heritage Foundation report.

Legislative elimination of an agency, however, takes time. Fortunately, in the near term, Congress can apply the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to prevent the Arbitration Rule from taking effect, and to block the CFPB from passing rules similar to it in the future.

As Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Paul Larkin has explained:

[The CRA is] Congress’s most recent effort to trim the excesses of the modern administrative state. The act requires the executive branch to report every “rule” — a term that includes not only the regulations an agency promulgates, but also its interpretations of the agency’s governing laws — to the Senate and House of Representatives so that each chamber can schedule an up-or-down vote on the rule under the statute’s fast-track procedure. The act was designed to enable Congress expeditiously to overturn agency regulations by avoiding the delays occasioned by the Senate’s filibuster rules and practices while also satisfying the [U.S. Constitution’s] Article I Bicameralism and Presentment requirements, which force the Congress and President to collaborate to enact, revise, or repeal a law. Under the CRA, a joint resolution of disapproval signed into law by the President invalidates the rule and bars an agency from thereafter adopting any substantially similar rule absent a new act of Congress.

Although the CRA was almost never invoked before 2017, in recent months it has been used extensively as a tool by Congress and the Trump Administration to roll back specific manifestations Obama Administration regulatory overreach (for example, see here and here).

Application of the CRA to expunge the Arbitration Rule (and any future variations on it) would benefit consumers, financial services innovation, and the overall economy. Senator Tom Cotton has already gotten the ball rolling to repeal that Rule. Let us hope that Congress follows his lead and acts promptly.

In Constitutional Law, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Truth on the Market Congressional Review Act, consumer financial protection bureau, financial services regulation, separation of powers

FCC Disregard of the Rule of Law Requires Legislative Reform

Alden Abbott — 7 October 2016

On October 6, the Heritage Foundation released a legal memorandum (authored by me) that recounts the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent sad history of ignoring the rule of law in its enforcement and regulatory actions. The memorandum calls for a legislative reform agenda to rectify this problem by reining in the agency. Key points culled from the memorandum are highlighted below (footnotes omitted).

1. Background: The Rule of Law

The American concept of the rule of law is embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and in the constitutional principles of separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a government under law, and equality of all before the law. As the late Friedrich Hayek explained:

[The rule of law] means the government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to see with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.

In other words, the rule of law involves a system of binding rules that have been adopted and applied by a valid government authority and that embody clarity, predictability, and equal applicability. Practices employed by government agencies that undermine the rule of law ignore a fundamental duty that the government owes its citizens and thereby weaken America’s constitutional system. It follows, therefore, that close scrutiny of federal administrative agencies’ activities is particularly important in helping to achieve public accountability for an agency’s failure to honor the rule of law standard.

2. How the FCC Flouts the Rule of Law

Applying such scrutiny to the FCC reveals that it does a poor job in adhering to rule of law principles, both in its procedural practices and in various substantive actions that it has taken.

Opaque procedures that generate uncertainties regarding agency plans undermine the clarity and predictability of agency actions and thereby undermine the effectiveness of rule of law safeguards. Process-based reforms designed to deal with these problems, to the extent that they succeed, strengthen the rule of law. Procedural inadequacies at the FCC include inordinate delays and a lack of transparency, including the failure to promptly release the text of proposed and final rules. The FCC itself has admitted that procedural improvements are needed, and legislative proposals have been advanced to make the Commission more transparent, efficient, and accountable.

Nevertheless, mere procedural reforms would not address the far more serious problem of FCC substantive actions that flout the rule of law. Examples abound:

The FCC imposes a variety of “public interest” conditions on proposed mergers subject to its jurisdiction. Those conditions often are announced after inordinate delays, and typically have no bearing on the mergers’ actual effects. The unpredictable nature and timing of such impositions generate a lack of certainty for businesses and thereby undermine the rule of law.
The FCC’s 2015 Municipal Broadband Order preempted state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevented municipally owned broadband providers from providing broadband service beyond their geographic boundaries. Apart from its substantive inadequacies, this Order went beyond the FCC’s statutory authority and raised grave federalism problems (by interfering with a state’s sovereign right to oversee its municipalities), thereby ignoring the constitutional limitations placed on the exercise of governmental powers that lie at the heart of the rule of law. The Order was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in August 2016.
The FCC’s 2015 “net neutrality” rule (the Open Internet Order) subjects internet service providers (ISPs) to sweeping “reasonableness-based” FCC regulatory oversight. This “reasonableness” standard gives the FCC virtually unbounded discretion to impose sanctions on ISPs. It does not provide, in advance, a knowable, predictable rule consistent with due process and rule of law norms. In the dynamic and fast-changing “Internet ecosystem,” this lack of predictable guidance is a major drag on innovation. Regrettably, in June 2014, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, by a two-to-one vote, rejected a challenge to the order brought by ISPs and their trade association.
The FCC’s abrupt 2014 extension of its long-standing rules restricting common ownership of local television broadcast stations, to encompass Joint Sales Agreements (JSAs) likewise undermined the rule of law. JSAs, which allow one television station to sell advertising (but not programming) on another station, have long been used by stations that had no reason to believe that their actions in any way constituted illegal “ownership interests,” especially since many of them were originally approved by the FCC. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit wisely vacated the television JSA rule in May 2016, stressing that the FCC had violated a statutory command by failing to carry out in a timely fashion the quadrennial review of the television ownership rules on which the JSA rule was based.
The FCC’s February 2016 proposed rules that are designed to “open” the market for video set-top boxes, appear to fly in the face of federal laws and treaty language protecting intellectual property rights, by arbitrarily denying protection to intellectual property based solely on a particular mode of information transmission. Such a denial is repugnant to rule of law principles.
FCC enforcement practices also show a lack of respect for rule of law principles, by seeking to obtain sanctions against behavior that has never been deemed contrary to law or regulatory edicts. Two examples illustrate this point.
- In 2014, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau proposed imposing a $10 million fine on TerraCom, Inc., and YourTelAmerica, Inc., two small telephone companies, for a data breach that exposed certain personally identifiable information to unauthorized access. In so doing, the FCC cited provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and accompanying regulations that had never been construed to authorize sanctions for failure to adopt “reasonable data security practices” to protect sensitive consumer information.
- In November 2015, the FCC similarly imposed a $595,000 fine on Cox Communications for failure to prevent a data breach committed by a third-party hacker, although no statutory or regulatory language supported imposing any penalty on a firm that was itself victimized by a hack attack

3. Legislative Reforms to Rein in the FCC

What is to be done? One sure way to limit an agency’s ability to flout the rule of law is to restrict the scope of its legal authority. As a matter of first principles, Congress should therefore examine the FCC’s activities with an eye to eliminating its jurisdiction over areas in which regulation is no longer needed: For example, residual price regulation may be unnecessary in all markets where competition is effective. Regulation is called for only in the presence of serious market failure, coupled with strong evidence that government intervention will yield a better economic outcome than will a decision not to regulate.

Congress should craft legislation designed to sharply restrict the FCC’s ability to flout the rule of law. At a minimum, no matter how it decides to pursue broad FCC reform, the following five proposals merit special congressional attention as a means of advancing rule of law principles:

Eliminate the FCC’s jurisdiction over all mergers. The federal antitrust agencies are best equipped to handle merger analysis, and this source of costly delay and uncertainty regarding ad hoc restrictive conditions should be eliminated.
Eliminate the FCC’s jurisdiction over broadband Internet service. Given the benefits associated with an open and unregulated Internet, Congress should provide clearly and unequivocally that the FCC has no jurisdiction, direct or indirect, in this area.
Shift FCC regulatory authority over broadband-related consumer protection (including, for example, deceptive advertising, privacy, and data protection) and competition to the Federal Trade Commission, which has longstanding experience and expertise in the area. This jurisdictional transfer would promote clarity and reduce uncertainty, thereby strengthening the rule of law.
Require that before taking regulatory action, the FCC carefully scrutinize regulatory language to seek to avoid the sorts of rule of law problems that have plagued prior commission rulemakings.
Require that the FCC not seek fines in an enforcement action unless the alleged infraction involves a violation of the precise language of a regulation or statutory provision.

4. Conclusion

In recent years, the FCC too often has acted in a manner that undermines the rule of law. Internal agency reforms might be somewhat helpful in rectifying this situation, but they inevitably would be limited in scope and inherently malleable as FCC personnel changes. Accordingly, Congress should weigh major statutory reforms to rein in the FCC—reforms that will advance the rule of law and promote American economic well-being.

In Broadband, Constitutional Law, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Federalism, Intellectual Property, Net Neutrality, Telecommunications Advertising, common ownership, FCC, Friedrich Hayek, municipal broadband, rule of law, separation of powers

Sixth Circuit’s Decision Rejecting FCC Preemption of State Restrictions on Municipal Broadband Ownership Strikes a Blow in Favor of the Rule of Law (But a Broader Problem Remains)

Alden Abbott — 19 August 2016

The American concept of “the rule of law” (see here) is embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and in the constitutional principles of separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a government under law, and equality of all before the law (see here). It holds that the executive must comply with the law because ours is “a government of laws, and not of men,” or, as Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in a 2006 address to the American Bar Association, “that the Law is superior to, and thus binds, the government and all its officials.” (See here.) More specifically, and consistent with these broader formulations, the late and great legal philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote that the rule of law “means the government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand – rules which make it possible to see with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.” (See here.) In other words, as former Boston University Law School Dean Ron Cass put it, the rule of law involves “a system of binding rules” adopted and applied by a valid government authority that embody “clarity, predictability, and equal applicability.” (See here.)

Regrettably, by engaging in regulatory overreach and ignoring statutory limitations on the scope of their authority, federal administrative agencies have shown scant appreciation for rule of law restraints under the current administration (see here and here for commentaries on this problem by Heritage Foundation scholars). Although many agencies could be singled out, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) actions in recent years have been especially egregious (see here).

A prime example of regulatory overreach by the FCC that flouted the rule of law was its promulgation in 2015 of an order preempting state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevented municipally-owned broadband providers from providing broadband service beyond their geographic boundaries (Municipal Broadband Order, see here). As a matter of substance, this decision ignored powerful economic evidence that municipally-provided broadband services often involve wasteful subsidies for financially–troubled government-owned providers that interfere with effective private sector competition and are economically harmful (my analysis is here). As a legal matter, the Municipal Broadband Order went beyond the FCC’s statutory authority and raises grave constitutional problems, thereby ignoring the constitutional limitations placed on the exercise of governmental powers that lie at the heart of the rule of law (see here). The Order lacked a sound legal footing in basing its authority on Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which merely authorizes the FCC to promote local broadband competition and investment (a goal which the Order did not advance) and says nothing about preemption. In addition, the FCC’s invocation of preemption authority trenched upon the power of the states to control their subordinate governmental entities, guaranteed to them by the Constitution as an essential element of their sovereignty in our federal system (see here). What’s more, the Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina municipal broadband systems that had requested FCC preemption imposed content-based restrictions on users of their network that raised serious First Amendment issues (see here). Specifically, those systems’ bans on the transmittal of various sorts of “abusive” language appeared to be too broad to withstand First Amendment “strict scrutiny.” Moreover, by requiring prospective broadband enrollees to agree not to sue their provider as an initial condition of service, two of the municipal systems arguably unconstitutionally coerced users to forgo exercise of their First Amendment rights.

Fortunately, on August 10, 2016, in Tennessee v. FCC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down the Municipal Broadband Order, pithily stating:

The FCC order essentially serves to re-allocate decision-making power between the states and their municipalities. This is shown by the fact that no federal statute or FCC regulation requires the municipalities to expand or otherwise to act in contravention of the preempted state statutory provisions. This preemption by the FCC of the allocation of power between a state and its subdivisions requires at least a clear statement in the authorizing federal legislation. The FCC relies upon § 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 for the authority to preempt in this case, but that statute falls far short of such a clear statement. The preemption order must accordingly be reversed.

The Sixth Circuit’s decision has important policy ramifications that extend beyond the immediate controversy, as Free State Foundation Scholars Randolph May and Seth Cooper explain:

The FCC’s Municipal Broadband Preemption Order would have turned constitutional federalism inside out by severing local political subdivisions’ accountability from the states governments that created them. Had the agency’s order been upheld, the FCC surely would have preempted several other state laws restricting municipalities’ ownership and operation of broadband networks. Several state governments would have been locked into an unwise policy of favoring municipal broadband business ventures with a track record of legal and proprietary conflicts of interest, expensive financial failures, and burdensome debts for local taxpayers.

The avoidance of a series of bad side effects in a corner of the regulatory world is not, however, sufficient grounds for breaking out the champagne. From a global perspective, the Sixth Circuit’s Tennessee v. FCC decision, while helpful, does not address the broader problem of agency disregard for the limitations of constitutional federalism and the rule of law. Administrative overreach, like a chronic debilitating virus, saps the initiative of the private sector (and, more generally, the body politic) and undermines its vitality. In addition, not all federal judges can be counted on to rein in legally unjustified rules (which in any event impose costly delay and uncertainty, even if they are eventually overturned). What is needed is an administration that emphasizes by word and deed that it is committed to constitutionalist rule of law principles – and insists that its appointees (including commissioners of independent agencies) share that philosophy. Let us hope that we do not have to wait too long for such an administration.

In Administrative, Broadband, Constitutional Law, Federal Communications Commission, Federalism, First Amendment, Google, Platforms, Telecommunications FCC, Friedrich Hayek, lawyering, municipal broadband, ron cass, Section 706, separation of powers, unconstitutional

Trimming the Sails of the Administrative State

Geoffrey Manne & Kristian Stout — 5 July 2016

In the wake of the recent OIO decision, separation of powers issues should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. In reaching its decision, the DC Circuit relied upon Chevron to justify its extreme deference to the FCC. The court held, for instance, that

Our job is to ensure that an agency has acted “within the limits of [Congress’s] delegation” of authority… and that its action is not “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”… Critically, we do not “inquire as to whether the agency’s decision is wise as a policy matter; indeed, we are forbidden from substituting our judgment for that of the agency.”… Nor do we inquire whether “some or many economists would disapprove of the [agency’s] approach” because “we do not sit as a panel of referees on a professional economics journal, but as a panel of generalist judges obliged to defer to a reasonable judgment by an agency acting pursuant to congressionally delegated authority.

The DC Circuit’s decision takes a broad view of Chevron deference and, in so doing, ignores or dismisses some of the limits placed upon the doctrine by cases like Michigan v. EPA and UARG v. EPA (though Judge Williams does bring up UARG in dissent).

Whatever one thinks of the validity of the FCC’s approach to regulating the Internet, there is no question that it has, at best, a weak statutory foothold. Without prejudging the merits of the OIO, or the question of deference to agencies that find “[regulatory] elephants in [statutory] mouseholes,” such broad claims of authority, based on such limited statutory language, should give one pause. That the court upheld the FCC’s interpretation of the Act without expressing reservations, suggesting any limits, or admitting of any concrete basis for challenging the agency’s authority beyond circular references to “abuse of discretion” is deeply troubling.

Separation of powers is a fundamental feature of our democracy, and one that has undoubtedly contributed to the longevity of our system of self-governance. Not least among the important features of separation of powers is the ability of courts to review the lawfulness of legislation and executive action.

The founders presciently realized the dangers of allowing one part of the government to centralize power in itself. In Federalist 47, James Madison observed that

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. (emphasis added)

The modern administrative apparatus has become the sort of governmental body that the founders feared and that we have somehow grown to accept. The FCC is not alone in this: any member of the alphabet soup that constitutes our administrative state, whether “independent” or otherwise, is typically vested with great, essentially unreviewable authority over the economy and our daily lives.

As Justice Thomas so aptly put it in his must-read concurrence in Michigan v. EPA:

Perhaps there is some unique historical justification for deferring to federal agencies, but these cases reveal how paltry an effort we have made to understand it or to confine ourselves to its boundaries. Although we hold today that EPA exceeded even the extremely permissive limits on agency power set by our precedents, we should be alarmed that it felt sufficiently emboldened by those precedents to make the bid for deference that it did here. As in other areas of our jurisprudence concerning administrative agencies, we seem to be straying further and further from the Constitution without so much as pausing to ask why. We should stop to consider that document before blithely giving the force of law to any other agency “interpretations” of federal statutes.

Administrative discretion is fantastic — until it isn’t. If your party is the one in power, unlimited discretion gives your side the ability to run down a wish list, checking off controversial items that could never make it past a deliberative body like Congress. That same discretion, however, becomes a nightmare under extreme deference as political opponents, newly in power, roll back preferred policies. In the end, regulation tends toward the extremes, on both sides, and ultimately consumers and companies pay the price in the form of excessive regulatory burdens and extreme uncertainty.

In theory, it is (or should be) left to the courts to rein in agency overreach. Unfortunately, courts have been relatively unwilling to push back on the administrative state, leaving the task up to Congress. And Congress, too, has, over the years, found too much it likes in agency power to seriously take on the structural problems that give agencies effectively free reign. At least, until recently.

In March of this year, Representative Ratcliffe (R-TX) proposed HR 4768: the Separation of Powers Restoration Act (“SOPRA”). Arguably this is first real effort to fix the underlying problem since the 1995 “Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act” (although, it should be noted, SOPRA is far more targeted than was the CRRA). Under SOPRA, 5 U.S.C. § 706 — the enacted portion of the APA that deals with judicial review of agency actions — would be amended to read as follows (with the new language highlighted):

(a) To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action and decide de novo all relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions, and rules made by agencies. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, this subsection shall apply in any action for judicial review of agency action authorized under any provision of law. No law may exempt any such civil action from the application of this section except by specific reference to this section.

These changes to the scope of review would operate as a much-needed check on the unlimited discretion that agencies currently enjoy. They give courts the ability to review “de novo all relevant questions of law,” which includes agencies’ interpretations of their own rules.

The status quo has created a negative feedback cycle. The Chevron doctrine, as it has played out, gives outsized incentives to both the federal agencies, as well as courts, to essentially disregard Congress’s intended meaning for particular statutes. Today an agency can write rules and make decisions safe in the knowledge that Chevron will likely insulate it from any truly serious probing by a district court with regards to how well the agency’s action actually matches up with congressional intent or with even rudimentary cost-benefit analysis.

Defenders of the administrative state may balk at changing this state of affairs, of course. But defending an institution that is almost entirely immune from judicial and legal review seems to be a particularly hard row to hoe.

Public Knowledge, for instance, claims that

Judicial deference to agency decision-making is critical in instances where Congress’ intent is unclear because it balances each branch of government’s appropriate role and acknowledges the realities of the modern regulatory state.

To quote Justice Scalia, an unfortunate champion of the Chevron doctrine, this is “pure applesauce.”

The very core of the problem that SOPRA addresses is that the administrative state is not a proper branch of government — it’s a shadow system of quasi-legislation and quasi-legal review. Congress can be chastened by popular vote. Judges who abuse discretion can be overturned (or impeached). The administrative agencies, on the other hand, are insulated through doctrines like Chevron and Auer, and their personnel subject more or less to the political whims of the executive branch.

Even agencies directly under the control of the executive branch — let alone independent agencies — become petrified caricatures of their original design as layers of bureaucratic rule and custom accrue over years, eventually turning the organization into an entity that serves, more or less, to perpetuate its own existence.

Other supporters of the status quo actually identify the unreviewable see-saw of agency discretion as a feature, not a bug:

Even people who agree with the anti-government premises of the sponsors [of SOPRA] should recognize that a change in the APA standard of review is an inapt tool for advancing that agenda. It is shortsighted, because it ignores the fact that, over time, political administrations change. Sometimes the administration in office will generally be in favor of deregulation, and in these circumstances a more intrusive standard of judicial review would tend to undercut that administration’s policies just as surely as it may tend to undercut a more progressive administration’s policies when the latter holds power. The APA applies equally to affirmative regulation and to deregulation.

But presidential elections — far from justifying this extreme administrative deference — actually make the case for trimming the sails of the administrative state. Presidential elections have become an important part about how candidates will wield the immense regulatory power vested in the executive branch.

Thus, for example, as part of his presidential bid, Jeb Bush indicated he would use the EPA to roll back every policy that Obama had put into place. One of Donald Trump’s allies suggested that Trump “should turn off [CNN’s] FCC license” in order to punish the news agency. And VP hopeful Elizabeth Warren has suggested using the FDIC to limit the growth of financial institutions, and using the FCC and FTC to tilt the markets to make it easier for the small companies to get an advantage over the “big guys.”

Far from being neutral, technocratic administrators of complex social and economic matters, administrative agencies have become one more political weapon of majority parties as they make the case for how their candidates will use all the power at their disposal — and more — to work their will.

As Justice Thomas, again, noted in Michigan v. EPA:

In reality…, agencies “interpreting” ambiguous statutes typically are not engaged in acts of interpretation at all. Instead, as Chevron itself acknowledged, they are engaged in the “formulation of policy.” Statutory ambiguity thus becomes an implicit delegation of rulemaking authority, and that authority is used not to find the best meaning of the text, but to formulate legally binding rules to fill in gaps based on policy judgments made by the agency rather than Congress.

And this is just the thing: SOPRA would bring far-more-valuable predictability and longevity to our legal system by imposing a system of accountability on the agencies. Currently, commissions often believe they can act with impunity (until the next election at least), and even the intended constraints of the APA frequently won’t do much to tether their whims to statute or law if they’re intent on deviating. Having a known constraint (or, at least, a reliable process by which judicial constraint may be imposed) on their behavior will make them think twice about exactly how legally and economically sound proposed rules and other actions are.

The administrative state isn’t going away, even if SOPRA were passed; it will continue to be the source of the majority of the rules under which our economy operates. We have long believed that a benefit of our judicial system is its consistency and relative lack of politicization. If this is a benefit for interpreting laws when agencies aren’t involved, it should also be a benefit when they are involved. Particularly as more and more law emanates from agencies rather than Congress, the oversight of largely neutral judicial arbiters is an essential check on the administrative apparatus’ “accumulation of all powers.”

The interest of judges tends to include a respect for the development of precedent that yields consistent and transparent rules for all future litigants and, more broadly, for economic actors and consumers making decisions in the shadow of the law. This is markedly distinct from agencies which, more often than not, promote the particular, shifting, and often-narrow political sentiments of the day.

Whether a Republican- or a Democrat— appointed district judge reviews an agency action, that judge will be bound (more or less) by the precedent that came before, regardless of the judge’s individual political preferences. Contrast this with the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, for example, where previously it had been committed to the idea that broadband was an information service, subject to an entirely different — and far less onerous — regulatory regime. Of course, the next FCC Chairman may feel differently, and nothing would stop another regulatory shift back to the pre-OIO status quo. Perhaps more troublingly, the enormous discretion afforded by courts under current standards of review would permit the agency to endlessly tweak its rules — forbearing from some regulations but not others, un-forbearing, re-interpreting, etc., with precious few judicial standards available to bring certainty to the rules or to ensure their fealty to the statute or the sound economics that is supposed to undergird administrative decisionmaking.

SOPRA, or a bill like it, would have required the Commission to actually be accountable for its historical regulations, and would force it to undergo at least rudimentary economic analysis to justify its actions. This form of accountability can only be to the good.

The genius of our system is its (potential) respect for the rule of law. This is an issue that both sides of the aisle should be able to get behind: minority status is always just one election cycle away. We should all hope to see SOPRA — or some bill like it — gain traction, rooted in long-overdue reflection on just how comfortable we are as a polity with a bureaucratic system increasingly driven by unaccountable discretion.

In Administrative Law, Apple, Broadband, Constitutional Law, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market administrative law, Chevron, cost-benefit analysis, FDA, politics, regulatory reform, separation of powers

Fracking, the Separation of Powers, Economic Welfare, and the Role of the Public (Or Mirabile Dictu! An Obama-Appointed Federal Judge Who Believes in the Separation of Powers)

Alden Abbott — 30 June 2016

An interesting thing happened on June 21^st. Scott Skavdahl, a federal district court judge appointed by President Barack Obama, invalidated the “Fracking Rule” adopted by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Even more interesting, however, was the fact that, in so holding, the judge relied heavily on a rather dusty, moth-eaten eighteenth century political doctrine, the separation of powers. What was behind this quaint decision? See the slip opinion in State of Wyoming, State of North Dakota, State of Utah, and Ute Indian Tribe v. U.S. Department of the Interior to find out.

The facts are straightforward. As the court explained, fracking – the procedure by which oil and gas producers inject water, sand, and certain chemicals into tight-rock formations (typically shale) to create fissures in the rock and allow oil and gas for collection in a well – is primarily responsible for the steady increase in domestic oil and natural gas production over the last decade. Purportedly in response to “public concern about whether fracturing can lead to or cause the contamination of underground water sources,” the BLM in 2012 initiated a rulemaking to implement “additional regulatory effort and oversight” of this practice on federal and Indian lands, over which it exercises jurisdiction. Three years later, on March 26, 2015, the BLM issued a final Fracking Rule. Several states, an Indian tribe, and representatives of affected industries challenged the Rule under the Administrative Procedure Act as arbitrary, not in accordance with law, and in excess of the BLM’s statutory jurisdiction and authority.

In its review, the court rejected the Government’s argument that various statutes authorized BLM to promulgate the Rule. Moreover, the court noted, significantly, that “the BLM has previously taken the position, up until promulgation of the Fracking Rule, that it lacked the authority or jurisdiction to regulate hydraulic fracking.” Furthermore, under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, “Congress vested the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] with the authority and duty to regulate hydraulic fracturing on all lands, federal, state and tribal.” Subsequently, in enacting the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EP Act), Congress sought “to expedite oil and gas development within the United States.” Employing standard methods of statutory construction, the court then determined that “the 2005 EP Act’s explicit removal of the EPA’s regulatory authority over non-diesel hydraulic fracturing likewise precludes the BLM from regulating that activity, thereby removing fracking from the realm of federal regulation.” It therefore concluded, as a matter of logic, that the BLM’s effort to regulate fracking on federal and Indian lands “through the Fracking Rule is in excess of its statutory authority and contrary to law.”

The court, however, did far more than rely on traditional tools of statutory construction in reaching its holding. In a jurisprudential flourish, Judge Skavdahl explained that the logic of his decision was compelled by the separation of powers [citations and internal quotation marks omitted]:

As this Court has previously noted, our system of government operates based upon the principle of limited and enumerated powers assigned to the three branches of government. In its simplest form, the legislative branch enacts laws, the executive branch enforces those laws, and the judicial branch ensures that the laws passed and enforced are Constitutional. See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176 (1803). A federal agency is a creature of statute and derives its existence, authority and powers from Congress alone. It has no constitutional or common law existence or authority outside that expressly conveyed to it by Congress. . . . In the absence of a statute conferring authority, then, an administrative agency has none. . . . This Court must be guided to a degree by common sense as to the manner in which Congress would likely delegate a policy decision of such economic and political magnitude to an administrative agency. Given Congress’ enactment of the EP Act of 2005, to nonetheless conclude that Congress implicitly delegated BLM authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing lacks common sense. Congress’ inability or unwillingness to pass a law desired by the executive branch does not default authority to the executive branch to act independently, regardless of whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the Citizens of the United States. [The Supreme] Court consistently has given voice to, and has reaffirmed, the central judgment of the Framers of the Constitution that, within our political scheme, the separation of governmental powers into three coordinate Branches is essential to the preservation of liberty.

The quaint notion that the separation of powers “is essential to the preservation of liberty” comports with the understanding of the Framers of the Constitution. As James Madison pithily stated in The Federalist Number 47, “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” To avoid such a tyrannical outcome, Madison emphasized, in The Federalist Number 51, the need for structural checks and balances whereby each of the three branches of the federal government could check the others. It is good to know that at least some recently minted federal judges remain attuned to the separation of powers’ significance.

“Economic constitutionalists” also underscore the potential economic case for a robust separation of powers. For example, Professor Jonathan Macey’s take on economic constitutionalism presents a particularly compelling defense of constitutionally separated powers as an economic welfare prescription that promotes efficiency. In particular:

Self-interested groups or individuals will lobby to political powers for their goals, possibly leading to injustice or inefficiency. In Macey’s interpretation of Madison, the separation of powers channels lobbyists into the competitive, more efficient market by raising transaction costs so much that private market means are less expensive than appealing to the various separate powers of government.

In short, in addition to promoting respect for the rule of law, attention to the separation of powers advances economic welfare and efficiency, as a normative matter.

Ultimately, of course, the future appointment of judges (like Judge Skavdahl) who are attentive to constitutional constraints requires the election of legislators and Presidents who are faithful to constitutionally-mandated limitations on government power. The latter, in turn, requires that the general public be made aware of – and support – those foundational constitutional restrictions. As Madison aptly put it in The Federalist Number 51, “[a] dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government”. Let us hope that the American public will prove capable of fulfilling its Madisonian responsibility in this regard.

In Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Google, Platforms, Regulation, Truth on the Market constitutional political economy, separation of powers

The Constitutionally-Challenged Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Now Directly Challenges the Lawful and Welfare-Enhancing Pay-Day Lending Industry

Alden Abbott — 6 June 2016

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is, to say the least, a controversial agency. As documented by such experts as Scalia Law School Professor Todd Zywicki, the CFPB imposes enormous costs on consumers and financial service providers through costly and unwarranted command-and-control regulation. Furthermore, as I explained in a February 2016 Heritage Foundation legal memorandum, the CFPB’s exemption from the oversight constraints that apply to other federal agencies offends the separation of powers and thus raises serious constitutional problems. (Indeed, a federal district court in the District of Columbia is currently entertaining a challenge to the Bureau’s constitutionality.)

Given its freedom from normal constitutionally-mandated supervision, the CFPB’s willingness to take sweeping and arguably arbitrary actions is perhaps not surprising. Nevertheless, even by its own standards, the Bureau’s latest initiative is particularly egregious. Specifically, on June 2, 2016, the CFPB issued a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Payday, Vehicle Title, and Certain High-Cost Installment Loans” (CFPB NPRM) setting forth a set of requirements that would effectively put “payday loan” companies out of business. (The U.S. Government has already unjustifiably harmed payday lenders through “Operation Choke Point,” pursuant to which federal bank regulators, in particular the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), have sought to deny those lenders access to banking services. A Heritage Foundation overview of Operation Choke Point and a call for its elimination may be found here; the harm the FDIC has imposed on payday lenders is detailed here.)

The CFPB defines a “payday loan” as “a short-term loan, generally for $500 or less, that is typically due on your next payday. . . . [The borrower] must give lenders access to . . . [his or her] checking account or write a check for the full balance in advance that the lender has an option of depositing when the loan comes due.” Moreover, payday loans are often structured to be paid off in one lump-sum payment, but interest-only payments – “renewals” or “rollovers” – are not unusual. In some cases, payday loans may be structured so that they are repayable in installments over a longer period of time.”

Despite their unusual character, economic analysis reveals that payday loans efficiently serve the needs of a certain class of borrower and that welfare is reduced if government seeks to sharply limit them. In a 2009 study, Professor Zywicki summarized key research findings:

Economic research strongly supports two basic conclusions about payday lending: First, those who use payday lending do so because they have to, not because they want to. They use payday lending to deal with short-term exigencies and a lack of access to payday loans would likely cause them substantial cost and personal difficulty, such as bounced checks, disconnected utilities, or lack of funds for emergencies such as medical expenses or car repairs. Those who use payday loans have limited alternative sources of credit, such as pawn shops, bank overdraft protection, credit card cash advances (where available), and informal lenders. Although expensive, payday loans are less expensive than available alternatives. Misguided paternalistic regulation that deprives consumers of access to payday loans would likely force many of them to turn to even more expensive lenders or to do without emergency funds. Although payday loans may lead some consumers to be trapped in a “debt trap” of repeated revolving debt, this concern is not unique to payday lending. Moreover, evidence indicates that those who are led into a debt trap by payday lending are far fewer in number than those who are benefited by access to payday loans.

Second, efforts by legislators to regulate the terms of small consumer loans (such as by imposing price caps on fees or limitations on repeated use “rollovers”) almost invariably produce negative unintended consequences that vastly exceed any social benefits gained from the legislation. Moreover, prior studies of price caps on lending have found that low-income and minority borrowers are most negatively affected by the regulations and the adjustments that they produce. Volumes of economic theory and empirical analysis indicate that further restrictions on payday lending likely would prove counterproductive and harmful to the very people such restrictions would be intended to help.

Unfortunately, the CFPB seems to be oblivious to these findings on payday lending, as demonstrated by key language of the CFPB NPRM:

[T]he [CFPB’s] proposal would identify it as an abusive and unfair practice for a lender to make a covered loan without reasonably determining that the consumer has the ability to repay the loan. The proposal generally would require that, before making a covered loan, a lender must reasonably determine that the consumer has the ability to repay the loan. The proposal also would impose certain restrictions on making covered loans when a consumer has or recently had certain outstanding loans. . . . The proposal also would identify it as an unfair and abusive practice to attempt to withdraw payment from a consumer’s account for a covered loan after two consecutive payment attempts have failed, unless the lender obtains the consumer’s new and specific authorization to make further withdrawals from the account. The proposal would require lenders to provide certain notices to the consumer before attempting to withdraw payment for a covered loan from the consumer’s account. The proposal would also prescribe processes and criteria for registration of information systems, and requirements for furnishing loan information to and obtaining consumer reports from those registered information systems. The Bureau is proposing to adopt official interpretations to the proposed regulation.

In short, the CFPB NPRM, if implemented, would impose new and onerous costs on payday lenders with respect to each loan, arising out of: (1) determination of the borrower’s ability to pay; (2) identification of the borrower’s other outstanding loans; (3) the practical inability to recover required payments from a defaulting consumer’s account (due to required consumer authorization and notice obligations); and (4) the registration of information systems and requirements for obtaining various sorts of consumer information from those systems. In the aggregate, these costs would likely make a large number of payday loan programs unprofitable – thereby (1) driving those loans out of the market and harming legitimate lenders while also (2) denying credit to, and thereby reducing the welfare of, the consumers who would be denied their best feasible source of credit.

As Heritage Foundation scholar Norbert Michel put it in a June 2, 2016 Daily Signal article:

The CFPB’s [NPRM] regulatory solution . . . centers on an absurd concept: ability to repay. Basically, the new rules force lenders to certify that consumers have the ability to repay their loan, turning the idea of voluntary exchange on its head.

Here, too, the new rules are based on the flawed idea that firms typically seek out consumers who can’t possibly pay what they owe. It doesn’t take a graduate degree to figure out that’s not a viable long-term business strategy.

None of this matters to the CFPB. Shockingly, neither does the CFPB’s own evidence.

In sum, the CFPB NPRM provides yet one more good reason for Congress to seriously consider abolishing the CFPB (legislation introduced by the House and Senate in 2015 would do this), with consumer protection authority authorities currently exercised by the Bureau returned to the seven agencies that originally administered them. While we are awaiting congressional action, however, the CFPB would be well-advised (assuming it truly desires to promote economic welfare) to reconsider its latest ill-considered initiative and withdraw the NPRM as soon as possible.

In Banking, Constitutional Law, Credit Cards, Economic Theory, Financial Regulation, Truth on the Market consumer financial protection bureau, financial reform, financial regulation, separation of powers

The Essential Facility of Obama’s Competition Policy

Kristian Stout — 19 April 2016

It appears that White House’s zeal for progressive-era legal theory has … progressed (or regressed?) further. Late last week President Obama signed an Executive Order that nominally claims to direct executive agencies (and “strongly encourages” independent agencies) to adopt “pro-competitive” policies. It’s called Steps to Increase Competition and Better Inform Consumers and Workers to Support Continued Growth of the American Economy, and was produced alongside an issue brief from the Council of Economic Advisors titled Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power.

TL;DR version: the Order and its brief do not appear so much aimed at protecting consumers or competition, as they are at providing justification for favored regulatory adventures.

In truth, it’s not exactly clear what problem the President is trying to solve. And there is language in both the Order and the brief that could be interpreted in a positive light, and, likewise, language that could be more of a shot across the bow of “unruly” corporate citizens who have not gotten in line with the President’s agenda. Most of the Order and the corresponding CEA brief read as a rote recital of basic antitrust principles: price fixing bad, collusion bad, competition good. That said, there were two items in the Order that particularly stood out.

The (Maybe) Good

Section 2 of the Order states that

Executive departments … with authorities that could be used to enhance competition (agencies) shall … use those authorities to promote competition, arm consumers and workers with the information they need to make informed choices, and eliminate regulations that restrict competition without corresponding benefits to the American public. (emphasis added)

Obviously this is music to the ears of anyone who has thought that agencies should be required to do a basic economic analysis before undertaking brave voyages of regulatory adventure. And this is what the Supreme Court was getting at in Michigan v. EPA when it examined the meaning of the phrase “appropriate” in connection with environmental regulations:

One would not say that it is even rational, never mind “appropriate,” to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.

Thus, if this Order follows the direction of Michigan v. EPA, and it becomes the standard for agencies to conduct cost-benefit analyses before issuing regulation (and to review old regulations through such an analysis), then wonderful! Moreover, this mandate to agencies to reduce regulations that restrict competition could lead to an unexpected reformation of a variety of regulations – even outside of the agencies themselves. For instance, the FTC is laudable in its ongoing efforts both to correct anticompetitive state licensing laws as well as to resist state-protected incumbents, such as taxi-cab companies.

Still, I have trouble believing that the President — and this goes for any president, really, regardless of party — would truly intend for agencies under his control to actually cede regulatory ground when a little thing like economic reality points in a different direction than official policy. After all, there was ample information available that the Title II requirements on broadband providers would be both costly and result in reduced capital expenditures, and the White House nonetheless encouraged the FCC to go ahead with reclassification.

And this isn’t the first time that the President has directed agencies to perform retrospective review of regulation (see the Identifying and Reducing Regulatory Burdens Order of 2012). To date, however, there appears to be little evidence that the burdens of the regulatory state have lessened. Last year set a record for the page count of the Federal Register (80k+ pages), and the data suggest that the cost of the regulatory state is only increasing. Thus, despite the pleasant noises the Order makes with regard to imposing economic discipline on agencies – and despite the good example Canada has set for us in this regard – I am not optimistic of the actual result.

And the (maybe) good builds an important bridge to the (probably) bad of the Order. It is well and good to direct agencies to engage in economic calculation when they write and administer regulations, but such calculation must be in earnest, and must be directed by the learning that was hard earned over the course of the development of antitrust jurisprudence in the US. As Geoffrey Manne and Josh Wright have noted:

Without a serious methodological commitment to economic science, the incorporation of economics into antitrust is merely a façade, allowing regulators and judges to select whichever economic model fits their earlier beliefs or policy preferences rather than the model that best fits the real‐world data. Still, economic theory remains essential to antitrust law. Economic analysis constrains and harnesses antitrust law so that it protects consumers rather than competitors.

Unfortunately, the brief does not indicate that it is interested in more than a façade of economic rigor. For instance, it relies on the outmoded 50 firm revenue concentration numbers gathered by the Census Bureau to support the proposition that the industries themselves are highly concentrated and, therefore, are anticompetitive. But, it’s been fairly well understood since the 1970s that concentration says nothing directly about monopoly power and its exercise. In fact, concentration can often be seen as an indicator of superior efficiency that results in better outcomes for consumers (depending on the industry).

The (Probably) Bad

Apart from general concerns (such as having a host of federal agencies with no antitrust expertise now engaging in competition turf wars) there is one specific area that could have a dramatically bad result for long term policy, and that moreover reflects either ignorance or willful blindness of antitrust jurisprudence. Specifically, the Order directs agencies to

identify specific actions that they can take in their areas of responsibility to build upon efforts to detect abuses such as price fixing, anticompetitive behavior in labor and other input markets, exclusionary conduct, and blocking access to critical resources that are needed for competitive entry. (emphasis added).

It then goes on to say that

agencies shall submit … an initial list of … any specific practices, such as blocking access to critical resources, that potentially restrict meaningful consumer or worker choice or unduly stifle new market entrants (emphasis added)

The generally uncontroversial language regarding price fixing and exclusionary conduct are bromides – after all, as the Order notes, we already have the FTC and DOJ very actively policing this sort of conduct. What’s novel here, however, is that the highlighted language above seems to amount to a mandate to executive agencies (and a strong suggestion to independent agencies) that they begin to seek out “essential facilities” within their regulated industries.

But “critical resources … needed for competitive entry” could mean nearly anything, depending on how you define competition and relevant markets. And asking non-antitrust agencies to integrate one of the more esoteric (and controversial) parts of antitrust law into their mission is going to be a recipe for disaster.

In fact, this may be one of the reasons why the Supreme Court declined to recognize the essential facilities doctrine as a distinct rule in Trinko, where it instead characterized the exclusionary conduct in Aspen Skiing as ‘at or near the outer boundary’ of Sherman Act § 2 liability.

In short, the essential facilities doctrine is widely criticized, by pretty much everyone. In their respected treatise, Antitrust Law, Herbert Hovenkamp and Philip Areeda have said that “the essential facility doctrine is both harmful and unnecessary and should be abandoned”; Michael Boudin has noted that the doctrine is full of “embarrassing weaknesses”; and Gregory Werden has opined that “Courts should reject the doctrine.” One important reason for the broad criticism is because

At bottom, a plaintiff … is saying that the defendant has a valuable facility that it would be difficult to reproduce … But … the fact that the defendant has a highly valued facility is a reason to reject sharing, not to require it, since forced sharing “may lessen the incentive for the monopolist, the rival, or both to invest in those economically beneficial facilities.” (quoting Trinko)

Further, it’s really hard to say when one business is so critical to a particular market that its own internal functions need to be exposed for competitors’ advantage. For instance, is Big Data – which the CEA brief specifically notes as a potential “critical resource” — an essential facility when one company serves so many consumers that it has effectively developed an entire market that it dominates? ( In case you are wondering, it’s actually not). When exactly does a firm so outcompete its rivals that access to its business infrastructure can be seen by regulators as “essential” to competition? And is this just a set-up for punishing success — which hardly promotes competition, innovation or consumer welfare?

And, let’s be honest here, when the CEA is considering Big Data as an essential facility they are at least partially focused on Google and its various search properties. Google is frequently the target for “essentialist” critics who argue, among other things, that Google’s prioritization of its own properties in its own search results violates antitrust rules. The story goes that Google search is so valuable that when Google publishes its own shopping results ahead of its various competitors, it is engaging in anticompetitive conduct. But this is a terribly myopic view of what the choices are for search services because, as Geoffrey Manne has so ably noted before, “competitors denied access to the top few search results at Google’s site are still able to advertise their existence and attract users through a wide range of other advertising outlets[.]”

Moreover, as more and more users migrate to specialized apps on their mobile devices for a variety of content, Google’s desktop search becomes just one choice among many for finding information. All of this leaves to one side, of course, the fact that for some categories, Google has incredibly stiff competition.

Thus it is that

to the extent that inclusion in Google search results is about “Stiglerian” search-cost reduction for websites (and it can hardly be anything else), the range of alternate facilities for this function is nearly limitless.

The troubling thing here is that, given the breezy analysis of the Order and the CEA brief, I don’t think the White House is really considering the long-term legal and economic implications of its command; the Order appears to be much more about political support for favored agency actions already under way.

Indeed, despite the length of the CEA brief and the variety of antitrust principles recited in the Order itself, an accompanying release points to what is really going on (at least in part). The White House, along with the FCC, seems to think that the embedded streams in a cable or satellite broadcast should be considered a form of essential facility that is an indispensable component of video consumers’ choice (which is laughable given the magnitude of choice in video consumption options that consumers enjoy today).

And, to the extent that courts might apply the (controversial) essential facilities doctrine, an “indispensable requirement … is the unavailability of access to the ‘essential facilities’[.]” This is clearly not the case with much of what the CEA brief points to as examples of ostensibly laudable pro-competitive regulation.

The doctrine wouldn’t apply, for instance, to the FCC’s Open Internet Order since edge providers have access to customers over networks, even where network providers want to zero-rate, employ usage-based billing or otherwise negotiate connection fees and prioritization. And it also doesn’t apply to the set-top box kerfuffle; while third-parties aren’t able to access the video streams that make-up a cable broadcast, the market for consuming those streams is a single part of the entire video ecosystem. What really matters there is access to viewers, and the ability to provide services to consumers and compete for their business.

Yet, according to the White House, “the set-top box is the mascot” for the administration’s competition Order, because, apparently, cable boxes represent “what happens when you don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.” ( “Elsewhere” to the White House, I assume, cannot include Roku, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix, and a myriad of other video options that consumers can currently choose among.)

The set-top box is, according to the White House, a prime example of the problem that

[a]cross our economy, too many consumers are dealing with inferior or overpriced products, too many workers aren’t getting the wage increases they deserve, too many entrepreneurs and small businesses are getting squeezed out unfairly by their bigger competitors, and overall we are not seeing the level of innovative growth we would like to see.

This is, of course, nonsense. Consumers enjoy an incredible amount of low-cost, high quality goods (including video options) – far more than at any point in history. After all:

From cable to Netflix to Roku boxes to Apple TV to Amazon FireStick, we have more ways to find and watch TV than ever — and we can do so in our living rooms, on our phones and tablets, and on seat-back screens at 30,000 feet. Oddly enough, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler … agrees: “American consumers enjoy unprecedented choice in how they view entertainment, news and sports programming. You can pretty much watch what you want, where you want, when you want.”

Thus, I suspect that the White House has its eye on a broader regulatory agenda.

For instance, the Department of Labor recently announced that it would be extending its reach in the financial services industry by changing the standard for when financial advice might give rise to a fiduciary relationship under ERISA. It seems obvious that the SEC or FINRA could have taken up the slack for any financial services regulatory issues – it’s certainly within their respective wheelhouses. But that’s not the direction the administration took, possibly because SEC and FINRA are independent agencies. Thus, the DOL – an agency with substantially less financial and consumer protection experience than either the SEC or FINRA — has expansive new authority.

And that’s where more of the language in the Order comes into focus. It directs agencies to “ensur[e] that consumers and workers have access to the information needed to make informed choices[.]” The text of the DOL rule develops for itself a basis in competition law as well:

The current proposal’s defined boundaries between fiduciary advice, education, and sales activity directed at large plans, may bring greater clarity to the IRA and plan services markets. Innovation in new advice business models, including technology-driven models, may be accelerated, and nudged away from conflicts and toward transparency, thereby promoting healthy competition in the fiduciary advice market.

Thus, it’s hard to see what the White House is doing in the Order, other than laying the groundwork for expansive authority of non-independent executive agencies under the thin guise of promoting competition. Perhaps the President believes that couching this expansion in free market terms ( i.e. that its “pro-competition”) will somehow help the initiatives go through with minimal friction. But there is nothing in the Order or the CEA brief to provide any confidence that competition will, in fact, be promoted. And in the end I have trouble seeing how this sort of regulatory adventurism does not run afoul of separation of powers issues, as well as assorted other legal challenges.

Finally, conjuring up a regulatory version of the essential facilities doctrine as a support for this expansion is simply a terrible idea — one that smacks much more of industrial policy than of sound regulatory reform or consumer protection.

In Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee, Supreme Court Will Have the Chance to Clarify that Patents are not Second Class Property Rights

Alden Abbott — 22 January 2016

On January 15, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Federal Circuit’s decision in Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee, a case that raises the question of whether patent rights, once issued initially by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Patent Office (PTO), are to be treated as fully legitimate interests or instead as “second class citizens” in the property rights firmament. Cuozzo also raises questions about the ability of a patent owner to obtain full judicial review of all aspects of an administrative decision that strips him of his property rights

This case turns on the construction of the American Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) provisions on post-issuance “inter partes review” (IPR) proceedings conducted by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), an administrative tribunal within PTO (see 35 U.S.C. § 311). The AIA did not alter the statutory understanding that, once PTO has issued a patent, the patent holder holds a legitimate property right (“patents shall have the attributes of personal property”, 35 U.S.C. § 261). Furthermore, post-AIA, a patent continues to be presumed to be valid, unless and until a third party meets the burden of proving it invalid (“[a] patent shall be presumed valid” and “[t]he burden of establishing invalidity of a patent or any claim thereof shall rest on the party asserting such invalidity”, 35 U.S.C. § 282).

In response to the critique that federal district court litigation took too long and made it too costly to challenge “low quality” patents, the AIA established administrative PTAB IPR proceedings as a faster and (therefore) less costly alternative to challenging patents in the courts. The AIA did not, however, alter the statutory presumption that a patent is a valid property right for purposes of such proceedings. Moreover, although the AIA never specifically addressed the issue, PTO decided to apply a “broadest reasonable interpretation” (BRI) approach in PTAB IPR patent claims assessments. BRI is the standard patent examiners apply before deciding whether to issue a patent. Because it errs on the side of reading claims very broadly, it raises the probability that particular claims will be read as unpatentable because they “claim too much” and stray into existing art. By contrast, federal district courts have never applied BRI, instead construing claims based on the neutral standard of “correct claims construction.” This means that IPRs are not a speedy neutral substitute for district court litigation – they are instead an inherently biased forum that fails to accord challenged patents the dignity the statutory presumption of validity merits. This degrades the value of patents and diminishes returns to patenting. In other words, although application of an onerous standard (BRI) may be appropriate in deciding whether to grant a patent right initially, applying that same standard to “second guess” a patent right that has been granted diminishes its status as a presumptively valid property right.

The Supreme Court in Cuozzo Speed Technologies will address the question of whether the PTAB “may construe claims in an issued patent according to their broadest reasonable interpretation rather than their plain and ordinary meaning.” The Cuozzo case arose as follows. Cuozzo owned a patent that discloses an interface which displays a vehicle’s current speed as well as the speed limit. In response to a challenge by Garmin International, Inc., the PTAB applied the BRI standard in disallowing certain of the patent’s claims as “obvious.” In February 2015, a two-judge Federal Circuit panel majority affirmed this determination (authored by Judge Timothy Dyk, writing for himself and for Judge Raymond Clevenger), finding no error in the Board’s claim construction under the BRI standard, and also held that it had no jurisdiction to review the PTO’s decision to institute the IPR.

In her dissent, Judge Pauline Newman stressed that the Federal Circuit’s approval of BRI in patent examinations “was based on the unfettered opportunity to amend in those proceedings. That opportunity is not present in I[PR]; amendment of claims requires permission, and since the inception of I[PR], motions to amend have been granted in only two cases, although many have been requested.” She noted that Congress intended an IPR to be an “adjudicative proceeding,” and “the PT[AB] tribunal cannot serve as a surrogate for district court litigation if the PTAB does not apply the same law to the same evidence.”

Judge Newman also dissented from the panel majority’s conclusion that 35 U.S.C. § 314(d) (which provides that PTO’s determination to institute an IPR “shall be final and unappealable”) “must be read to bar review of all institution decisions, even after the [PTAB] issues a final decision.” According to Judge Newman, “[t]his ruling appears to impede full judicial review of the PTAB’s final decision, further negating the purpose of the America Invents Act to achieve correct adjudication of patent validity through Inter Partes Review in the [PTAB] administrative agency.” In particular, a failure to review IPR institution decisions even after a final IPR ruling has been rendered would, as noted patent attorney Gene Quinn explains, give “the USPTO . . . unreviewable discretion to do whatever they want with respect to instituting IPRs, even in situations where petitions are clearly defective on their face.” Quinn also points to a broader separation of powers concern raised by such unreviewable discretion:

Even if Congress intended to forever insulate [IPR] initiation decisions from judicial review, such an intention would seem to clearly violate at least the spirit of the bedrock Constitutional principles that ensure checks and balances between and among co-equal branches of government. If Congress could do this here with patent rights then why couldn’t Congress prevent judicial review of decisions relating to real property?

After a sharply divided Federal Circuit voted six to five to deny rehearing en banc, the Supreme granted Cuozzo’s petition for certiorari, focused on these two questions:

(1) Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that, in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board may construe claims in an issued patent according to their broadest reasonable interpretation rather than their plain and ordinary meaning; and (2) whether the court of appeals erred in holding that, even if the Board exceeds its statutory authority in instituting an IPR proceeding, the Board’s decision whether to institute an IPR proceeding is judicially unreviewable.

The Cuozzo case will afford the Supreme Court an opportunity to construe the AIA in a manner that gives full protection to the property rights that have long been understood to flow from a U.S. patent grant – an understanding that accords with treatment of patents as a true form of property, not as second class statutory privileges. Such an understanding would also strengthen the U.S. patent system and thereby promote the economic growth and innovation it engenders (see here for a description of recent research describing the economic benefits of a strong patent system).

In Constitutional Law, Intellectual Property, Patent, Truth on the Market America Invents Act, Intellectual property, separation of powers

Archives For separation of powers

Strike 1: The AT&T/Time-Warner Transaction

Strike 2: The Sabre/Farelogix Acquisition

Strike 3: FTC v. Qualcomm

Axon v. FTC

The HSR Act and Post-Consummation Merger Challenges

The FTC’s Belated Attack on the Axon/Vievu Acquisition

Does the FTC Violate the Separation of Powers?

Conclusion

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