Few people who served in the Obama Administration or are professors at Harvard Law School praise the Trump Administration for anything, but Cass Sunstein is commending the Trump Executive Orders on regulatory reform. Sunstein writes: The [new executive] order calls for the official designation of “Regulatory Reform Officers” and “Regulatory Reform Task Forces” within each department and agency of the federal government. The reform officers are charged with carrying out three earlier executive orders. The first is Trump’s own requirement that agencies eliminate two regulations for every one that they issue. More surprisingly, the second and third come from Presidents Bill Clinton…
Platonic Advice for the University Cosmopolitans
It probably should not have been a surprise when, affirming that the attorneys general of Washington and Minnesota had legal standing to challenge the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration, the Ninth Circuit panel pointed to the international dimensions of the University of Washington’s and the University of Minnesota’s activities to argue for a “concrete and particularized injury” from the order. Especially not to me—for back in the day, and indeed for eight wonderful years, I was an international student, lending my own zestful and idiosyncratic brand of cosmopolitan diversity to students and colleagues at the University of Toronto. (If I hadn’t been there to explain Ronald Reagan to them, they never would have understood.)
The truth is that all of our great universities, in the United States and abroad—understanding “our” in a sense that will be clear soon enough—are international.
Against National Injunctions
The Trump executive order temporarily barring travelers from 7 countries has once again raised the issue of a single federal district court issuing a nationwide injunction. This type of injunction was also used against the Obama Administration’s deferred action program (DAPA). In my view, these type of injunctions are extremely problematic. Samuel Bray, an expert on equity, has written about the serious problems with these injunctions. In this short piece, he notes three basic problems. The first is the problem of forum shopping. The plaintiff simply chooses an hospitable circuit in which to file the case. The Ninth Circuit for the…
