Article

“Standing” and Remedial Rights in Administrative Law

Modern doctrine about judicial review of administrative action traces back to Association of Data Processing Service Organizations v. Camp (1970). There, the Supreme Court announced a new test for deciding whether a plaintiff has “standing” to challenge the legality of an action taken by a federal agency. Judges were simply supposed to ask (1) “whether the plaintiff alleges that the challenged action has caused him injury in fact” and (2) “whether the interest sought to be protected by the [plaintiff] is arguably within the zone of interests to be protected or regulated by the statute or constitutional guarantee” that the challenged action allegedly violated.

Partly because of intervening scholarship, modern courts and commentators have translated Data Processing’s discussion of “standing” into the language of remedial rights (or “rights of action”). At least since the 1980s, Data Processing has been understood to hold that when a federal agency oversteps its authority, the Administrative Procedure Act normally confers remedial rights upon everyone who satisfies Data Processing’s test for “standing.” That is an exceptionally important aspect of modern administrative law. But it is mistaken—not just about the Administrative Procedure Act, but also about what Data Processing itself held. This Article shows that Data Processing’s concept of “standing” was only a preliminary screen, not the last word about whether plaintiffs have a claim for relief. The Supreme Court has never made a considered decision that when an agency is behaving unlawfully, the Administrative Procedure Act confers the same remedial rights upon plaintiffs whose interests are only “arguably” within a protected zone as upon plaintiffs whose interests are actually protected.

Corporate Disestablishment

Across the American economy, the wall between church and company is crumbling. Businesses large and small have taken on religious identities and now conduct their corporate affairs according to religious principles. The Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which held that for-profit corporations are eligible to claim religious exemptions from general laws, added significant legal momentum to this emerging cultural phenomenon.

In the wake of Hobby Lobby, scholars concerned about the expansion of corporate religion have searched in vain for coherent limiting principles. Drawing on an underexplored set of cases in which employees claim that companies have impermissibly imposed religion, this Article identifies such principles. It argues—on both doctrinal and normative grounds—that values of conscience, non-domination, and mutual respect work in tandem to constitute the outer boundaries of corporate religion. These values, in turn, mirror norms central to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, making a parallel case for “corporate disestablishment.” The idea of corporate disest­ablishment reflects structural similarities between political and private governments and clarifies the proper relationship between religion and business in a diverse modern economy.

The “Murder Scene Exception” – Myth or Reality? Empirically Testing the Influence of Crime Severity in Federal Search-and-Seizure Cases

Prior experimental studies suggest that judges are susceptible to cognitive biases when making legal decisions, such as being motivated by the legally irrelevant nature of a defendant’s crime when determining the admissibility of challenged evidence. However, that research has been constrained to hypothetical cases, limiting the real-world conclusions that can be drawn from it. Addressing this empirical gap, we offer a novel observational analysis that tests the influence of crime severity on suppression outcomes in actual search-and-seizure cases from U.S. Courts of Appeals.

Using legislative criminal penalties to measure crime severity, our analysis shows that as crime severity increases, judges become significantly less likely to exclude challenged evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds—even though crime severity is not a doctrinally relevant consideration. Another legally extrinsic factor, the ideology of the opinion-writing judge, is also found to exert an influence, but only in the most serious criminal cases that involve a life sentence or the death penalty. In these particularly high-stakes decisions, conservative-leaning judges are more likely to uphold the admissibility of challenged evidence, while liberal-leaning judges are more likely to suppress it. Our data also indicate that the intrusiveness of the challenged police search, a doctrinally relevant factor, independently influences admissibility judgments.

The results of our study both confirm and complicate existing understandings of judicial decision-making in the Fourth Amendment context and beyond. Furthermore, by directly building on two lines of prior experimental findings grounded in psychology theory, the “empirical triangulation” approach we operationalize here illustrates an advantageous model for optimizing the validity of empirical scholarship on judicial behavior.

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