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Administrative Remedies

Administrative Remedies

By: Gwendolyn Savitz and Marc Roark
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Administrative Remedies

Because you can't fix what you don't understand.

Join Professor Gwendolyn Savitz and Interim Dean Marc Roark from the University of Tulsa College of Law as they demystify the world of administrative law.

Most people don't realize that the rules governing their daily lives—from the medications we take to the air we breathe, from workplace safety standards to financial regulations—aren't created by Congress. They're created by federal agencies using delegated authority. And there's a whole body of law governing how agencies can (and can't) exercise that power.

In each episode, Gwen and Marc break down complex legal doctrines using real-world examples, timely analogies, and actual regulatory documents. To help things make sense for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

Whether you're a law student trying to understand the Administrative Procedure Act, a business owner navigating regulatory compliance, or just a curious citizen wondering how the TSA decided on exactly 3.4 ounces, this podcast makes administrative law accessible, relevant, and even fascinating.

From the nondelegation doctrine to rulemaking procedures, from the major questions doctrine to modern debates about agency power, Administrative Remedies gives you the background knowledge you need to understand the way the federal government actually gets things done.

New episodes weekly.

Gwendolyn Savitz and Marc Roark
Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • The Major Questions Doctrine in Practice
    Dec 23 2025

    Picking up where they left off, Gwen and Marc turn to the two competing versions of the Major Questions Doctrine: the weak, interpretive version and the strong version that demands near-microscopic specificity. And to show how these versions operate in real life, they walk straight into the blockbuster 2023 case Biden v. Nebraska, where the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan.

    The statutory text seemed generous: the Secretary could “waive or modify” student-loan provisions during a national emergency. COVID was a national emergency. Waive means eliminate. Modify means change. Yet the Court said that forgiving $430 billion in loans for 43 million borrowers was simply too major — and that even broad, literal statutory text wasn’t clear enough. Marc both appreciate Roberts’s now-famous line comparing the government’s interpretation of “modify” to the way the French Revolution "modified" the country's nobility.

    They use this to show the full force of the strong version of the doctrine: for truly significant decisions, ordinary delegation isn’t enough. Courts require explicit authorization, tailored to the precise scenario an agency faces — a level of specificity Congress almost never provides. Justice Kagan’s dissent raises the alarm: the doctrine is becoming a “get-out-of-text-free card,” enabling courts to invalidate policies they dislike even when Congress’s language is unambiguously broad.

    The episode then zooms out to the real-world consequences: agencies are becoming more cautious, breaking big rules into smaller ones, searching for hyper-specific statutory hooks, and gaming the system simply to survive judicial review. Gwen and Marc map out how this rising skepticism interacts with the Court’s broader project — reining in agencies through major questions, Chevron, and structural challenges all at once.

    Takeaway: The stronger the doctrine gets, the harder it becomes for agencies to act — even when Congress wrote broad authority on purpose. The Court says Congress must speak clearly on big questions. But in practice, the demand for “extraordinary clarity” risks paralyzing modern governance.

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    18 mins
  • The Major Questions Doctrine Explained
    Dec 16 2025

    Gwen and Marc open this episode with a deceptively simple babysitter analogy: you tell the sitter “use anything in the kitchen,” but you don’t expect her to mount a cutting board to the wall and teach knife-throwing, or install a $6,000 closet system. The permission technically covers those choices — but that’s clearly not what you meant. That disconnect becomes the doorway into the Major Questions Doctrine, the Court’s newest tool for saying: “If Congress meant to authorize something this big, it would’ve said so clearly.”

    From there, they rewind to Brown & Williamson, when the FDA tried to regulate tobacco by treating nicotine like any other drug. The statutory text fit — in some ways perfectly — yet the Court refused to believe Congress hid such massive economic and political authority inside ordinary words. Gwen shows how that early instinct, even without a label, planted the seeds of today’s doctrine.

    Then the episode turns to the decision that christened the doctrine by name: West Virginia v. EPA. Roberts framed the Clean Power Plan not as routine emissions regulation, but as a wholesale restructuring of the American energy sector — far too consequential, he argued, for an agency to find tucked inside an older statute. Through the Court’s own language, Gwen and Marc unpack what counts as a “major question”: billions in economic impact, deep political salience, dramatic expansions of authority, and situations where Congress has repeatedly considered but rejected similar proposals.

    But they also highlight the doctrine’s shadows. The Court has never articulated a clear test; agencies don’t know how many “factors” are enough; and the dividing line between ordinary policymaking and “major” policymaking keeps shifting, depending on who’s drawing it.

    Takeaway: Sometimes the words of a statute technically fit — but the Court refuses to believe Congress granted vast power by implication. When the decision is big enough, the Court demands clarity Congress rarely provides.

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    16 mins
  • Trump v. Slaughter at Oral Argument
    Dec 9 2025

    In this episode, Gwen and Marc break down the Supreme Court’s oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, the case that could upend nearly a century of precedent on independent agencies. Building on Part 1’s explanation of how the case reached the Court, this episode examines what happened in the courtroom: the justices’ questions, the strategies on both sides, and the constitutional stakes that hovered over every exchange.

    They walk through the Solicitor General’s forceful attack on Humphrey’s Executor, including his description of the precedent as a “decaying husk,” and the Court’s repeated efforts to understand where the limits of the unitary executive theory might lie. Gwen and Marc explore sharp exchanges with Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, Barrett, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Alito, from concerns about the scope of executive power to whether any multi-member commission could survive under the government’s theory.

    They also examine what a ruling for Trump could mean in practice — from immediate at-will removal of commissioners to the ripple effects on agencies like the FTC, SEC, NLRB, and the Federal Reserve. Finally, they offer a grounded reading of where the Court seems headed and why even the “narrow” options would still reshape the administrative state.

    This concludes their two-part series on Trump v. Slaughter. When the decision comes down, they will return with a follow-up episode analyzing the Court’s holding and its implications.

    What They Cover in This Episode

    • The Solicitor General’s argument for overruling Humphrey’s Executor
    • Why the government describes independent agencies as constitutionally incompatible
    • The justices’ concerns about where the unitary executive theory stops
    • Sotomayor’s “for now, for now” challenge
    • Kagan’s slippery-slope questions
    • Gorsuch’s nondelegation angle and the “wolf comes as a wolf” moment
    • Barrett and Roberts exploring “narrower” paths
    • The debate over single-director vs. multi-member agencies
    • How a ruling could affect the FTC, SEC, NLRB, Fed, and beyond
    • The range of possible outcomes and what seems most likely
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    20 mins
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