Administrative Remedies

Gwendolyn Savitz and Marc Roark
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Government
  • Updated Weekly

Because you can't fix what you don't understand. The rules governing your daily life - from the medications you take to the air you breathe, from workplace safety to financial regulation - weren't made by Congress. They were made by federal agencies operating under delegated authority. And there's an entire body of law governing how that power works, when it can be challenged, and what happens when it goes wrong. Administrative Remedies explains that law. Professor Gwendolyn Savitz and Dean Marc Roark of the University of Tulsa College of Law break down the doctrines behind the headlines - Chevron, the major questions doctrine, Jarkesy, due process, agency enforcement - using real-world analogies and current Supreme Court cases. For law students, practitioners, and anyone who wants the administrative state to actually make sense. New episodes weekly.

  1. 2d ago

    Birthright Citizenship and Mail Voting: Two Executive Orders, Two Very Different Days in Court

    Two executive orders came from the same desk, and the government gave the same defense for both: the challenge came too early, because nothing had happened to anyone yet. The argument lost against the birthright citizenship order, and it has lost every time since. Against the mail voting order, the Supreme Court accepted it and held that the district court never had jurisdiction. The difference was the drafting. The birthright order commands agencies to reach a result: no department or agency shall issue citizenship documents. The mail voting order commands the Postal Service to run a rulemaking, and a rulemaking's outcome has to stay open. Gwen and Marc trace how that choice of wording decides which body of law tests a policy, when the clock starts, who can get into court, and what a loss actually costs. In this episode: Why the birthright order was ready for review immediately, while agency guidance under it would have arrived slowly, agency by agencyBiden v. Nebraska, where a presidential policy was carried out by the Secretary of Education, and why losing on the statute left the Higher Education Act as a second routeA "ladder" of losses: procedural, statutory, and constitutional, and why only the constitutional one takes a policy off the table for goodConstitutional avoidance: the interpretive canon, the separate habit of not deciding things, and why avoidance works poorly when a question isn't closeTrump v. Barbara: a 6–3 affirmance on two different grounds, and Justice Kavanaugh's statutory route, which would have left a door open for CongressThe second birthright order, enjoined before its implementing guidance existedExecutive Order 14399 on mail voting: deadlines attached to proposals, a Supreme Court stay for prematurity, a final rule issued three days before that ruling, and then the government arguing the challengers were too lateThe twist: the Postal Service is exempt from ordinary APA review, so the case the plaintiffs were told to wait for may not be available to themThe lesson isn't that one instrument protects a policy. Each one buys time and changes which question a court gets to first. The real drafting question is which loss you can live with. Recorded September 11, 2026. These cases are moving quickly, and developments after that date aren't reflected here. Hosted by Professor Gwendolyn Savitz and Dean Marc Roark of the University of Tulsa College of Law. Next week: standing, and who is allowed to challenge agency action at all. Tags/keywords: administrative law, executive orders, birthright citizenship, Trump v. Barbara, Biden v. Nebraska, constitutional avoidance, ripeness, standing, APA, Postal Service, mail voting, Supreme Court, law school

  2. Sep 8

    So Many Cases Die at the Door: What Judicial Review Actually Is

    Loper Bright Enterprises sued the Secretary of Commerce, and the case had no trial, no depositions, and no discovery. It was decided on cross-motions for summary judgment, on a record the agency finished building before anyone filed a complaint. That's not an anomaly — that's what challenging agency action looks like. And the herring fishermen were lucky in a way most challengers aren't: they got a court to answer the question they came to ask. Season Three opens by taking apart the picture everyone carries around — agency acts, you object, a judge takes a look and fixes it or doesn't. Error correction. Gwen and Marc walk through why that description is true often enough to be believable and wrong often enough to matter. Underneath it sits a set of doctrines that decide whether the error is ever reached at all: standing, finality, ripeness, exhaustion, mootness, and the categories courts have placed outside review entirely. None of them asks whether the agency was wrong. We read 5 U.S.C. § 706 closely — Congress wrote the grounds. Congress did not write the intensity, and the intensity is where the cases are decided. Section 706 read identically the morning Chevron came down and the morning it was overruled. Also in this episode: why Bennett v. Spear gave three statutory words their content and why agency lawyers draft against it; the asymmetry that makes standing easy for a regulated company and hard for the person downwind; Patel v. Garland and how far a jurisdiction-stripping statute reaches; and where Gwen and Marc disagree about whether any of this is construction or something more deliberate. Plus Sackett, Lucia, and Jarkesy — courts opening doors, not closing them — and what distinguishes the cases that get in. Next week: executive orders, and why the choice between signing one and routing a policy through an agency determines which body of law ever gets to test it.

  3. Jul 7 ·  Bonus

    Mullin v. Doe: When Courts Can't Look

    Fritz Miot has lived in California for fifteen years under Temporary Protected Status, working in an Alzheimer's research lab while managing a diabetes diagnosis that Haiti's collapsed healthcare system can't treat. On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court told him a federal court isn't allowed to ask whether the government even followed its own rules before ending his status — not whether he loses on the merits, but whether anyone can look at all. In the second half of our emergency two-part season opener, Gwen and Marc dig into Mullin v. Doe: how "no judicial review of any determination" swallowed a mandatory consultation requirement, why the State Department told DHS one thing and the public another, and what Justice Thomas's solo concurrence is quietly setting up for a future case. Slaughter closed the check inside the agency. Mullin closes the one outside it.

  4. Jul 2 ·  Bonus

    Trump v. Slaughter: The End of the Independent Agency

    For ninety years, Congress could build federal agencies designed to operate at arm's length from the president. Bipartisan commissions, staggered terms, for-cause removal — a whole architecture of institutional independence protected by Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). On June 29, 2026, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey's by name and said it had been wrong the day it was decided. Rebecca Slaughter, the FTC commissioner Donald Trump fired in March 2025 for reasons that had nothing to do with her job performance, loses her case. So does the general category of "independent agency" as a distinct constitutional structure. In this episode, we walk through what Trump v. Slaughter actually held, why the Court's reasoning goes wider than its holding, and what happens next. We cover the "Decision of 1789" the majority uses as its historical anchor and Justice Sotomayor's response. We examine the stare decisis fight — seven prior Supreme Court cases had blessed the Humphrey's structure by name, including recent decisions the Court had just handed down. We explain the companion case, Trump v. Cook, decided the same morning, which saved the Federal Reserve on historical grounds while everyone else lost the same protection. And we get into the part the majority didn't quite say out loud: the opinion carefully carves out the Fed and Article I courts, but not administrative law judges. What that silence means for the MSPB, for ALJ tenure protection, and for every federal adjudication system in the country is the question the next Supreme Court term will start to answer. Justice Gorsuch's concurrence lays out what he calls the "ratchet effect" — Congress delegated enormous power to agencies on the premise that those agencies would be independent, and that premise is now gone. What Congress thought it bargained for is not what Congress got. Justice Barrett's dissent in Cook asks how history can support both a categorical rule ending independence everywhere and a carveout preserving it at one institution. The Court, she notes, does not say. Read the full explainer at remediespodcast.com/learn-trump-v-slaughter-explained.

  5. Jun 9

    No Right to a Lawyer: Asylum from Inside Detention

    A visitation room in a private detention facility in rural Louisiana. Cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, two plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Elena is on one side. A lawyer who drove three hours from New Orleans is on the other. They have ninety minutes. Elena has eight months until the hearing that decides whether she gets asylum or gets sent back to Honduras. The evidence she needs to prove her case is in a town she can't safely call into, held by family members who might be at risk just from gathering it. In the second part of their immigration deep dive — and the final episode of Season 2 — Gwen and Marc move from the machinery to the person standing inside it: Why representation matters more in immigration than anywhere else in the federal system — represented asylum seekers win at several times the rate of unrepresented ones, and unrepresented detained respondents face denial rates around ninety percentThe Sixth Amendment gap: immigration removal is classified as civil, not criminal, so there's no right to appointed counsel. If you can't find a lawyer and the pro bono organizations are full, you represent yourself against a trained government attorney through an interpreterHow detention structurally degrades the case before the hearing happens — bond decided in a ten-minute video proceeding, evidence that can't be gathered from inside a facility, and the same docket clock running whether you're preparing from a lawyer's office or a monitored phone boothThe constitutional floor that most people assume exists and doesn't: plenary power from the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case, Thuraissigiam's holding that someone apprehended twenty-five yards inside the border has essentially no due process right to judicial review, and a 2025 executive order testing whether that logic extends to anyone anywhere in the country who can't prove two years of presenceWhy you don't have to disagree with the doctrine to be troubled by the outcomes — strict or generous, the law is supposed to apply the same way to the same facts, and the data says it doesn'tNext season: judicial review. What happens when this finally gets to court — and why it's not the rescue mechanism people imagine.

  6. Jun 2

    700 Judges, 3.2 Million Cases: The System That Decides Asylum Cases

    Two asylum seekers cross the southern border six months apart. Same country, same persecution, same statute. A clerk neither of them has ever met routes one to the regular docket and the other to an expedited docket. One gets heard in eight months. The other is waiting until 2028. That single routing decision is now six years of difference. In the first of a two-part deep dive on immigration adjudication, Gwen and Marc walk through the system that will decide both of their cases: 3.2 million pending cases, 2.3 million of them asylum, divided among roughly 700 immigration judges — about 3,200 cases per judge, each requiring hours of fact-intensive testimony through interpreters about events in another countryThe particular social group doctrine — the single most contested category in asylum law, which has flipped four times in eleven years through Attorney General certification. Same statute, same words, opposite results depending on who holds the office when your case is heardHow the AG cleared 767,000 cases in 2025 — the highest single-year total in the system's history — through a mix of procedural exits, compressed dockets, and doctrinal changes that foreclosed categories of claims that were viable when applicants filedThe MSPB decision that stripped immigration judges of civil service protections, holding they're inferior officers removable at will — meaning the judge deciding whether to grant asylum on a borderline theory now knows she can be fired tomorrow with no notice and no appealThe denial rate climbing from roughly fifty percent in 2023 to eighty percent in February 2026, without a single statutory changeRosa's hearing is in 2028. She'll argue a social group theory the Attorney General has already foreclosed, with six-year-old evidence about a country she fled six years ago, in front of a judge who can be removed at will. The statute hasn't changed. Everything else has. Next episode: the person standing inside the machinery — detention, representation, expedited removal, and why the Constitution doesn't fix any of it.

  7. May 26

    The Framework That Decides Disability

    Until June 2024, the Social Security Administration was denying disability claims on the grounds that applicants could work as pneumatic tube operators — a job that functionally disappeared decades ago. The agency's catalog of occupations hadn't been updated since 1991. Congress noticed. Courts complained. The agency issued two emergency messages. The fix removed 114 jobs nobody was citing anyway and added a documentation requirement to 13 jobs people were. The vocational expert who cited pneumatic tube operator last year can cite it again next year, as long as they say an extra sentence. That catalog isn't the problem. It's the symptom. In this episode, Gwen and Marc walk through what Social Security disability adjudication actually looks like when you run it two and a half million times a year: The five-step sequential evaluation that decides every claim — substantial gainful activity, severity, the listings, past work, and the step five question that wins or loses most cases: is there any other job in the national economy you could do?The grids — literal rows and columns where you plug in age, education, work history, and RFC, and the table tells you whether you're disabled. The Supreme Court blessed this trade in Heckler v. Campbell: uniformity over individualized judgment, explicitly because the alternative would "hinder needlessly an already overburdened agency"The age cliff: at fifty-four, the grids say not disabled. At fifty-five, same medical condition, same RFC, same education, same work history — disabled. The borderline rule that's supposed to soften this treats five months as too far awayHow every structural feature from the trilogy — the forty-six point judge-level variation, the weak internal review, the ex ante control mechanisms — runs through the credibility finding and the RFC, which determine where you land on the gridsThe Matthews problem at scale: the test counts administrative burden as a factor, and at two and a half million applications a year, that factor dominates the math. There's no doctrinal floor on how thin process can get once the system is big enoughPeople die waiting for hearings. The GAO and Social Security's own inspector general have documented it. At a nine-month average wait — an improvement from the fifteen months it was running in 2023 — that number is meaningful every year. That's not the system failing. That's the system working as designed, at volume.

  8. May 19

    Nobody Said Deny More Cases: How Agency Preferences Reach the Hearing Room

    In the final episode of a three-part series on how agencies actually produce outcomes, Gwen and Marc trace the mechanisms that did the work — all of them upstream of the hearing room and mostly invisible from outside: Case completion targets that measure speed but not thoroughness — and a Seventh Circuit concurrence warning that even well-intentioned production pressure "can alter the essential function of adjudication"Quality review rubrics that aren't published, shift with administrations, and can't be appealed — but feed into performance evaluations that have real career consequencesSocial Security Rulings that describe themselves as not having "the force and effect of law" and in the same sentence say they are "binding on all components" — binding policy issued without notice and commentThe 1984 case that saw it coming: Association of Administrative Law Judges v. Heckler, where the court found outcome-based targeting of ALJs "violated the spirit of the APA, if no specific provision thereof"Immigration as the amplified version: 700-case-per-year quotas for judges without APA independence protections, deciding cases where the stakes are deportationSomewhere out there is a claimant with the same diagnosis as someone approved three years ago by the same ALJ in the same office. That claimant gets denied — not because the case changed, but because the system around the judge changed. And nobody outside the agency can see why.

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Because you can't fix what you don't understand. The rules governing your daily life - from the medications you take to the air you breathe, from workplace safety to financial regulation - weren't made by Congress. They were made by federal agencies operating under delegated authority. And there's an entire body of law governing how that power works, when it can be challenged, and what happens when it goes wrong. Administrative Remedies explains that law. Professor Gwendolyn Savitz and Dean Marc Roark of the University of Tulsa College of Law break down the doctrines behind the headlines - Chevron, the major questions doctrine, Jarkesy, due process, agency enforcement - using real-world analogies and current Supreme Court cases. For law students, practitioners, and anyone who wants the administrative state to actually make sense. New episodes weekly.

Information

  • Creator
    Gwendolyn Savitz and Marc Roark
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    40
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Gwendolyn Savitz and Marc Roark
  • Show Website
    Administrative Remedies