Search results for ""author thomas w. merrill""

A leading expert on the administrative state describes the past, present, and future of the immensely consequential—and equally controversial—legal doctrine that has come to define how Congress’s laws are applied by the executive branch.The Constitution makes Congress the principal federal lawmaker. But for a variety of reasons, including partisan gridlock, Congress increasingly fails to keep up with the challenges facing our society. Power has inevitably shifted to the executive branch agencies that interpret laws already on the books and to the courts that review the agencies’ interpretations.Since the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, this judicial review has been highly deferential: courts must uphold agency interpretations of unclear laws as long as these interpretations are “reasonable.” But the Chevron doctrine faces backlash from constitutional scholars and, now, from Supreme Court justices who insist that courts, not administrative agencies, have the authority to say what the law is. Critics of the administrative state also charge that Chevron deference enables unaccountable bureaucratic power. Thomas Merrill reviews the history and immense consequences of the Chevron doctrine and suggests a way forward. Recognizing that Congress cannot help relying on agencies to carry out laws, Merrill rejects the notion of discarding the administrative state. Instead, he focuses on what should be the proper relationship between agencies and courts in interpreting laws, given the strengths and weaknesses of these institutions. Courts are better at enforcing the rule of law and constitutional values; agencies have more policy expertise and receive more public input. And, unlike courts, agencies are subject to at least some political discipline.The best solution, Merrill suggests, is not of the either-or variety. Neither executive agencies nor courts alone should pick up the slack of our increasingly ineffectual legislature.

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With Congress paralyzed, lawmaking falls to executive agencies and courts that interpret existing statutes. Due to the so-called Chevron doctrine, courts generally defer to agencies. Thomas Merrill examines the immense consequences of the doctrine and the intense backlash, offering a new way to conceptualize the authority of agencies and courts.

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How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending. Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts. The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses. By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

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How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending. Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts. The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses. By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

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This collection of essays, commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics, explores a fundamental concept crucial to today’s discourse in law and ethics in general and in bioethics in particular. Since its formation in 2001, the council has frequently used the term “human dignity” in its discussions and reports. In this volume scholars from the fields of philosophy, medicine and medical ethics, law, political science, and public policy address the issue of what the concept of “human dignity” entails and its proper role in bioethical controversies. Human Dignity and Bioethics is an attempt to clarify a controversial concept, one that is a critical component in the decisions of policymakers. Contributors: Adam Schulman, F. Daniel Davis, Daniel C. Dennett, Robert P. Kraynak, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, Patricia S. Churchland, Gilbert Meilaender, Holmes Rolston III, Charles Rubin, Nick Bostrom, Richard John Neuhaus, Peter Augustine Lawler, Diana Schaub, Leon R. Kass, Susan M. Shell, Martha Nussbaum, David Gelernter, Patrick Lee, Robert P. George, Paul Weithman, Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M., Rebecca Dresser, and Edmund D. Pellegrino.

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