Noah Rosenblum

@narosenblum

Associate Professor @NYULaw (but views are not my employer’s) | Legal History, Administrative State, New York State Courts | “agenda-driven naysayer whose head instantiates academic ethers”

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Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· 2d

Me, on most historical events: great man history simplifies complex social and economic processes in ways that make history tractable but fundamentally mislead on the nature of historical change and foster a dangerous cult of hero worship. Me, on Abraham Lincoln:

"But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.'

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· 5d

No notes

"Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk-takers," said Jordi Hays, a co-host of the technology industry talk show TBPN. "I can't think of any archetype of man that fits that description more today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets.
,»

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· 22d

M-dashes are often a sign of lazy writing. Good writing relies on periods.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jul 14

Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jul 2

I will never get used to this sycophantic BS. Beneath the dignity of a republic.

Propaganda dispatch from the Social Security Administration praising Trump.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 29

Locke, still bangin

§ 199. As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. - When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own / ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 19

This is the first installment in a much bigger project. It has already benefitted enormously from generous feedback, and we’re eager for more. (Special thanks to the nameless senior scholar who told me that an earlier version of this paper made him want to gouge his eyes out 🙃 — me too JB….) (4/4)

1 Associate Professors of Law, Columbia Law School and NYU School of Law, respectively. For helpful comments and conversations, thanks to Ash Ahmed, Sam Bagenstos, Nick Bednar, Christine Billy, Emily Bremer, Blake Emerson, Seth Frotman, Don Goodson, Jill Hasday, Chris Havasy, Matt Lawrence, Nicholas Parrillo, Sabeel Rahman, Shalev Roisman, Bijal Shah, Glen Staszewski, and James Tierney, as well as participants in the Administering a Democratic Political Economy conference at Yale Law School, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, the New Voices in Administrative Law Roundtable at Notre Dame Law School, the Public Law Workshop at the University of Minnesota Law School, the Faculty Workshop at Michigan State Law, and the Reimagining Administrative Law Initiative at UCLA Law. Special thanks to Josh Macey for reviewing this chapter for this volume. For excellent research assistance, thanks to Nathaniel Berman, Isaac Buck, Miranda Litwak, Sami Stafford, Nathaniel Thompson, and Isabelle Wechsler.

8 For recent pluralist scholarship, see, e.g., Nicholas R. Parrillo, Administrative Law as a Choice of Business Strategy, 93 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1031 (2025); Richard E. Levy & Robert L. Glicksman, Agency-Specific Precedents, 89 TEX. L. REV. 499, 500 (2011); Kirti Datla & Richard L. Revesz, Deconstructing Independent Agencies (and Executive Agencies), 98 CORNELL L. REV. 769 (2013); Anne Joseph O'Connell, Bureaucracy at the Boundary, 162 U. PA. L. REV. 841 (2014); Daniel A. Farber & Anne Joseph O'Connell, The Lost World of Administrative Law, 92 TEX. L. REV. 1137(2014); Rachel E.
Barkow, Insulating Agencies: Avoiding Capture Through Institutional Design, 89 TEX. L. REV. 15
2010); Sharon B. Jacobs, The Statutory Separation of Powers, 129 YALE L.J. 378(2019); Ganesh Sitaraman, The Political Economy of the Removal Power, 134 HARV. L. REv. 352 (2020); K. Sabeel Rahman, Reconstructing the Administrative State in an Era of Economic and Democratic Crisis, 131 HARV. L. REV. 1671 (2018); K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Utilities: Private Power, Social Infrastructure, and the Revival of the Public Utility Concept, 39 CARDOZO L. REV. 1621 (2018); Daniel E. Walters, The Administrative Agon: A Democratic Theory for a Conflictual Regulatory State, 132 YALE L.J. 1 (2022);
Jeremy K. Kessler & Charles F. Sabel, The Uncertain Future of Administrative Law, 150 DAEDALUS 188 (2021); Nicholas R. Parrillo, Federal Agency Guidance and the Power to Bind: An Empirical Study of Agencies and Industries, 36 YALE J. ON REG. 165 (2019); Rory Van Loo, Regulatory Monitors: Policing Firms in the Compliance Era, 119 COLUM. L. REV. 369 (2019); Nicholas R. Parrillo, Federal Agency Guidance: An Institutional Perspective (Admin. Conf. of the U.S., Oct. 12, 2017). For scholarship in the pluralist tradition motivating this effort, see JERRY L. MASHAW, BUREAUCRATIC JUSTICE: MANAGING SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY CLAIMS (1983); Peter L. Strauss, The Place of Agencies in Government:
Separation of Powers and the Fourth Br…

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 19

As we rethink administration in light of the Roberts Court’s wrecking job and Trump’s lawlessness, we should abandon one-size-fits-all. Instead, admin should adapt to the salient differences between agencies. It’s time to bring the political economy of administration back into law. (3/4)

These examples illustrate that different political economies might recommend different administrative rules. Even if the aim of administrative law is the same-
ensuring that agencies engage in reasoned decision-making-different political
economies countenance different standards.

Pluralism would work similarly in the elaboration of agency structure. A pluralist approach would recognize that different agency structures appropriately respond to the different political economies of different administrative subfields. For example, we should expect presidential control over all agency rulemaking and legal interpretation to have different effects in different circumstances. Sometimes, these effects might have benefits that outweigh the costs. Other times, they might not.

Embracing structural pluralism does not mean making each agency its own law, only rejecting a singular rule for all agencies. Pluralist law and analysis could well treat like agencies alike. One could imagine something like a numerus clausus for administrative law. What Emily Chertoff calls "force agencies" raise similar legal questions.93 So too do agencies that provide public benefits or generate statistical information.94 Meanwhile, certain objects of regulation raise similar legal questions, regardless of the context in which they are regulated. Private data, for example, needs to safeguarded, whether it is in the hands of an enforcement agency like the IRS, a benefits agency like Social Security, or a regulatory body like the SEC. Exactly which dimensions of agency structure and operations are legally relevant is an open area of scholarly research. Pluralism claims that these differences should matter.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 19

For a long time now, administrative law has been imagined as one-size-fits-all: all agencies are supposed to be governed by the same law and structured in the same way. But this is wrong and risks suppressing key differences that should be legally relevant. (2/4)

This chapter argues that, as we move forward, we should abandon the one-
size-fits-all model of administrative law that has dominated the field for the past half-century. This approach has erased differences in political economy, reduced administrative efficiency, and compounded existing inequalities of wealth and power.
A better approach would be pluralist. It would start from the premise that optimal legal processes and institutional structures should vary depending on the specific characteristics of regulated activities and actors. Supplying the economy with the right amount of money, 4 for example, is a very different challenge from reducing air pollution, evaluating asylum applications,6 or combatting unfair methods of competition.? Administrative law should recognize and even center these substantive differences.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 10

I love this argument. Of course both these premises are false: we did not agree to decide contemporary legal disputes by reference to what judges think the Founders meant, and it’s not true that if a law does not mean its “original meaning” it means nothing at all.

"I get people who see it as sounding crazy," said Kostas Moros, a director at the Second Amendment Foundation.
"But that's what we agreed to. If it's not tied to that original meaning, then it means nothing at all."

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jun 6

I am prepared to believe there was more waste and complacency in the federal government than big state liberals like me liked to acknowledge. But I would appreciate it if some of the DOGE-apologists would recognize that the government was also more effective and critical than they understood

Headline about second case of screwworm in Texas

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· May 5

And since I’m just bragging now, check out this whole smoked whitefish my students bought me to celebrate the end of the semester. How’s that for time, temperature, and salinity??

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· May 5

We have benefitted from lots of help, especially the fantastic @dukelaw.bsky.social editors! If you want to know the state of Unitary Executive Theory, understand the recent firing of the NSF board, or imagine ways forward, this is a piece for you! (3/3) scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcont...

†* William T. Comfort III Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. For comments and conversation, the authors would like to thank Michael Asimow, Aditya Bamzai, Emily Bremer, Adam Cox, Dan Deacon, Abbe Gluck, Jeannie Fromer, Emma Kaufman, Nina Mendelson, Jonas Monast, Bernie Meyler, Anne Joseph O'Connell, Arti Rai, and Chris Walker. Thanks also to participants at the ABA Administrative Law Conference, the National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars, the Duke Law Journal Administrative Law Symposium, and faculty workshops at NYU, Fordham, and Tulane. Special thanks to Pieter Brower, Nathan Gimness, Nathaniel Thompson, Isabelle Wechsler, and Fiona Yip for fantastic research assistance, and to George Elsesser, Ava Erfani, Meghan Hodges, and the rest of the wonderful team at DLJ for superlative editing. The research on which this article is based was supported by the Filomen D'Agostino Research Fund at NYU School of Law, for which we are extremely grateful.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· May 5

The two keys moves in the Article are to show (1) how Arthrex epitomizes the Court’s recent jurisprudence while threatening to swallow the administrative state, and (2) how it can be compellingly read through Myers not to, if judges want to. Taft shows us a way to try to keep both. (2/3)

The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the "two-way street" that defines the administrative state, where subordinate officials routinely shape and constrain the decisions of their superiors through their expertise and exercise of statutory authority. Part II analyzes Arthrex itself, contrasting minimalist and maximalist interpretations of the decision and showing how both readings are ultimately unsatisfactory. In particular, this Part brings out the incompatibility of the most intuitive reading of Arthrex with the two-way administrative state described in Part I. Part III attempts a reconciliation. It develops a proposed middle course, based on the policy-administration distinction, which harmonizes presidential control with bureaucratic autonomy across a range of contexts, from civil service protections to advisory committee independence to intergovernmental arrangements.
By recovering and updating Taft's and his peers' insights about the distinct domains of policy and administration, this Article aims to preserve the valuable features of the modern administrative state while respecting Arthrex's vision of democratic accountability through presidential oversight.
The policy-administration framework provides courts with manageable standards for determining when presidential control is constitutionally required, while avoiding the wholesale transformation of administrative governance that a maximalist reading of Arthrex would entail.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· May 5

Thrilled to share my latest, with @rickhills.bsky.social, in @dukelaw.bsky.social’s DLJ! Presidential Administration After Arthrex tries to work within the Supreme Court’s current Article II jurisprudence to reconcile a powerful, democratic president with competent administration. (1/3)

PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION AFTER ARTHREX
NOAH A. ROSENBLUM† & RODERICK M. HILLS, JR. †1
ABSTRACT
The federal government employs over 2 million civilian workers, all but a few thousand of whom enjoy forms of tenure and insulation from presidential control. This bureaucracy,
sometimes called
"the
administrative state," is organized in a many-layered structure defined by statutes and regulations. Pursuant to law and court decisions,
the
administrative state routinely makes findings of fact, policy determinations, and conclusions of law, sometimes independent of the president. The Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Arthrex risks unsettling this arrangement. It adopts a simplistic, hierarchical vision of bureaucratic organization, which is frankly incompatible with existing statutes and regulations.
This Article proceeds on the theory that, nevertheless, the Court did not intend to overthrow the government. It offers alternative readings of Arthrex—narrow and broad—to show how the case undermines the existing law of agency design. It then shows how a middle road could reconcile presidentialism with the Constitution, statutory law, and bureaucracy, enabling the Court to advance presidential administration without abandoning traditional principles of administrative law.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Apr 15

Sports gambling is a scourge and it is a shame on our country that we’ve allowed this to proliferate www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/n...

Mr. Jacobson tapped his phone on a conference table. "It's on the app," he said. In a year he had wagered about $4.46 million on DraftKings and FanDuel accounts, two of the nation's leading online sports betting sites, according to investigators.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Apr 7

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Trying to Save the Soul of America 1
Julian E. Zelizer
2
The Red and the Blue Endure 15
Julian E. Zelizer
3 Antagonists and Enablers: The Tragic Dance of Biden and the Supremes 29
John Fabian Witt
4
Between the Nightmare and the Noble Dream:
The Ideal of Department of Justice Independence in a Time of Hyperpartisanship 52
Noah A. Rosenblum
Checked Ambition: The Biden Economic Agenda 70
Sean H. Vanatta
6
Unrequited Labor: The Biden Administration's Failure to Win Over Working-Class America 92
Michael Kazin
7 Energy, Climate, and the Environment 104
Paul Sabin
8 After the Fall of Roe: The Biden Presidency and Reproductive Policy 123
Mary Ziegler

vili CONTENTS
9 Biden, Congressional Impasse, and the "Broken"
U.S. Immigration System 142
Maria Cristina Garcia
10 Trans Rights and the Emerging Politics of Gender 159
Timothy Stewart-Winter
11 The Biden Presidency and the Education Wars 173
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
12 The Equity President: Biden's Reckoning with Race and the Nation 188
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
13 Invest, Align, Compete: Biden on China 208
Joyce Mao
14 Biden, Russia, and Ukraine 223
Ekaterina Pravilova
15 Biden and the Middle East: Legacy at a Crossroads 242
Daniel C. Kurtzer
16 How Biden Failed to Understand the Modern
Media Presidency 264
Kathryn Cramer Brownell
17 The Historic, and Consequential, Harris Vice Presidency 281
Joel K. Goldstein
18 The Withdrawal 301
Timothy Naftali
Notes 333
Contributors
Index 419
413

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Apr 2

Today we celebrate not only the second night of Passover, but, fittingly, the anniversary of the fall of Richmond. As Union troops pressed in on the capital of the Confederacy, the traitor Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled. Truly a day to honor and remember for all patriots and lovers of freedom.

“He stated as indispensable conditions of a settlement: the restoration of the authority of the United States over the whole of the State, and the cessation of hostilities by the disbanding of the army, and that there shall be no receding on the pat of the Executive from his position on the slavery question. The latter proposition was explained to mean that the Executive action on the subject of slavery, so far as it had been declared in messages, proclamations and other official acts, must pass for what they were worth; that he would not receded from his position. But that this would not debar action by other authorities of the government.”

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Mar 28

My contribution to the great Balkinization symposium on @slskowronek.bsky.social’s exciting new book is now live! balkin.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...

The Adaptability Paradox raises a profound and challenging question about the way the Constitution works. Steve uses that question to retell the history of American government as the shift between a series of different settlements, which has only recently broken down. I wonder, though, whether the book suggests a different historical account, one that emphasizes not consensus, but dissensus. In this way, his book points us towards a new approach to Constitutional theory—and new historical and political projects that would go with it.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Mar 26

@governor.ny.gov why do you hate me

Sign showing wait times for subway of 15 minutes and 19 minutes

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Mar 18

Provost official! Still hard to believe it’s real. Getting to teach such wonderful students and work alongside the humane & brilliant faculty and staff at @nyulaw.bsky.social is an absolute dream. Thank you — I feel so very lucky. Stay tuned for my first post-tenure project: Article II fanfic?

Email from Provost alerting me that she has signed my promotion and tenure docket

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Mar 5

You would think from this headline that NC voters are “anti incumbent” who want to “punish the powerful on both sides of the aisle.” But actually this article is about how three Dems who voted with the GOP just got shellacked. I am going to become the joker.

A Political Earthquake
Rattles the North Carolina Legislature
Voters across this politically purple state made it clear on Tuesday that they wanted to punish the powerful on both sides of the aisle. It may be a warning to incumbents elsewhere.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Feb 23

Pretty magical in Brooklyn this morning

Snowy morning in Brooklyn after the storm

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 31

❤️🔥

From the financial times: “It is still statistically true in America that there are Christians in any random group. Recently we saw soldiers gathered around a man they held pros-trate. They beat him first. If Christ appears to us in this moment, he is not among the executioners.”

Marilynne Robinson's most recent books are the novel "Jack' and 'Reading Genesis'

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 25

Some straightforward and useful accounting here from M Gessen:

Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., its officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm's parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people's papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white.
The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.

Confronted with a list like this - a deluge like this - we look for details that might explain why these people were subjected to this treatment, details that might reassure us that we, by contrast, are not in danger. Good was married to a woman, and her wife, who is butch, spoke impertinently to an ICE officer, so there, Good wasn't your average white mother after all. ChongLy Thao, the man who was dragged out of his house in his underwear, is an immigrant from Laos; he is not white, and presumably he speaks with an accent. The woman on her way to the medical appointment and the family with six kids drove through areas where anti-ICE protests were taking place. The 5-year-old child's family doesn't have permanent status.
Little is known about Pretti at this writing, but his father said he did participate in protests and he might have been carrying a gun (legally). We don't focus on these details in order to justify the ICE agents' actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 13

[sickos.gif]

Subway ad advertising NYC’s childcare success:

Peace of Mind
Delivered By NYC
A record high 150,000 children enrolled in more affordable early childhood education programs
A seat offered to every child applying to 3-K on time (first time in NYC history)
Out-of-pocket costs for child care subsidies reduced from $55 to 55 per week
That's New York City's agencies delivering for you.
Every day. Everywhere.
Every day.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 13

“Most significant mass resignations since February” 🤦‍♂️🙃

The departures - including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief - represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February. At that time, five leaders and supervisors of the department's Public Integrity Section, which investigates public officials for possible corruption, resigned rather than comply with an appointee of President Donald Trump's orders to dismiss the bribery case against then-New York mayor Eric Adams.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 11

I had an anecdotal sense that Trump’s appellate court nominees were backing him up, but I didn’t realize it was so extreme.

But the data suggests that in the 13 appellate courts, there is increasingly such a thing as a Trump judge. The president's appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. Ninety-two percent of their total votes were in favor of the administration. That figure far outstrips support for Mr. Trump's agenda from appeals court judges appointed by other Republican presidents, and from Mr. Trump's appointees to the district courts.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 10

Big Oil, welcome to the resistance?

"No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country," said one private equity investor who specialises in energy.

Noah Rosenblum@narosenblum· Jan 3

“So, you see, you can’t argue in the abstract like those naïve protesters on college campuses are doing. You’ve got to look at the hard numbers if you’re going to make an informed decision about a potential blood-for-oil swap.”