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Private Enforcement in Administrative Courts
- Author(s):
- Michael Sant\'Ambrogio
- Date:
- 2019
- Group(s):
- MSU Law Faculty Repository
- Item Type:
- Article
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/7b91-1655
- Abstract:
- Scholars debating the relative merits of public and private enforcement have long trained their attention on the federal courts. For some, laws giving private litigants rights to vindicate important policies generate unaccountable "private attorneys general" who interfere with public enforcement goals. For others, private lawsuits save cash-strapped government lawyers money, time, and resources by encouraging private parties to police misconduct on their own. Yet largely overlooked in the debate is enforcement inside agency adjudication, which often is depicted as just another form of public enforcement, only in a friendlier forum. This Article challenges the prevailing conception of administrative enforcement. Based on a comprehensive examination of over eighty administrative courts, I find that agencies rarely enforce on their own. Among other things, private parties may have procedural rights to file regulatory complaints, trigger agency investigations, demand evidentiary hearings, join public enforcement actions as parties, and even pursue claims without the involvement of the agency's enforcement arm. Although some administrative enforcement is virtually indistinguishable from either public or private enforcement in federal court, more often administrative schemes employ attributes of both.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 9 months ago
- License:
- Attribution
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private-enforcement.pdf