Volume 45, Issue 2

“Right now, I feel like I could take on the whole empire myself,” Dak declared shortly before the Battle of Hoth. Though Luke Skywalker’s co-pilot did not mean American federal bureaucracy, the United States Congress shared a similar disdain for growing executive power when it passed the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in 1996. Little did…

Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by this sun of York;And all the clouds that lour’d upon our houseIn the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Anti-administrativists are poised for a coup d’état. For the last thirty years, courts have deferred to federal agencies’ interpretations of law while rarely considering the constitutionality…

While Minnesota was confronting a budget impasse in 2017, culminating with the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision in Ninetieth Minnesota  State  Senate  v.  Dayton,     New  Mexico  was  experiencing  a similar struggle over an item veto of appropriations for the state legislature and public higher education institutions. Legislative staffs in both states were well aware of each…

In 1975, the Minnesota Legislature created the Office of Administrative Hearings (“OAH”) as an executive branch court. The legislature intended to create an efficient, flexible, less-expensive, and neutral forum to support—but not supplant—administrative agency decision-making. Since that time, the legislature passed numerous statutes placing final decision-making authority in OAH’s hands, rather than having the courts…

“A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of ironclad authority upon all occasions that offer[.] A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm is the wiser policy.” Partisan gridlock at the Minnesota State Capitol inevitably heads south along a well-worn path from the Cass Gilbert-designed capitol building to the Ramsey…

Providing and maintaining an education system is one of the most important functions of state and local governments. Few would dispute that fact. Educational attainment is linked to students’ long-term economic success and to the social mobility that has marked economic progress in the United States and around the globe. Parents know this instinctively. We…

Under what conditions, if any, are state courts justified in making policy decisions that affect the political process? We live in increasingly politically polarized times. Congress and the President are unable work together. We now see a similar pattern at the state level. Paralleling what has happened at the federal level, state judiciaries are compelled…

The term “prevailing party” first appeared in a federal statute in the Bankruptcy Act of 1867, which provided that “[t]he party prevailing in the suit shall be entitled to costs against the adverse party.”   Since then, it has become commonplace in fee-shifting provisions of statutes and contracts alike. In an adversarial process, such as litigation…

On October 11, 2016, four individuals shut down the Enbridge oil pipelines running through Clearwater County. These four individuals traveled to the small town of Leonard, Minnesota, and cut their way into the valve station. Two of them accessed the shut-off valve, while one videotaped.  The last individual contacted Enbridge, so the company had the…

Parents have a “fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of [their children].” However, more than three million parents are subject to child protection investigations every year in the United States. Approximately 700 to 800 children are removed from their homes daily, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human…