Thomas & Price on the Federal Rulemaking Process and Atypical Cases

Suja Thomas and Dawson Price have posted on SSRN a draft of their article, How Atypical Cases Make Bad Rules: A Commentary on the Rulemaking Process, which will be published in the Nevada Law Journal. Here’s the abstract:

Commentators have criticized the rulemaking process for decades. Legal scholarship has focused primarily on challenging its constitutionality, questioning whether different actors make better rulemakers, and arguing that some entities have too much power and others have too little. Other commentators have focused on the tools that should be employed by rulemakers when evaluating proposals, focusing on the importance of empirical studies to support rule changes and the role of bias in the formulation of certain rules. In this symposium article, we add to this scholarship by arguing that advisory committees should refrain from proposing and adopting rule amendments that are motivated by atypical cases. Such rules will also affect typical cases, creating bad law for typical cases because the rules were not formulated for such cases. The article describes the thesis of a previous article on how atypical cases make bad law and applies the framework to a current amendment to change the scope of discovery, showing atypical cases make bad rules.