Question: Who do the statutes give the power of creating regulations?
Answer: executive branch agencies

Question: Where are the regulations from executive branch agencies found?
Answer: the Code of Federal Regulations

Question: What areas of the Constitution deal with issuses such as aviation, railroads, and trademarks?
Answer: Commerce and Spending Clauses

Question: In areas of law such as insurance, there are laws refusing to regulate them as long as states have laws doing what?
Answer: regulating them

Question: What type of property are trademarks and copyrights?
Answer: intellectual property

Question: What governs things such as military, money, foreign relations, etc.?
Answer: federal law

Question: What enabled federal law to begin expanding into other areas such as avaition, telecommunications, railroads, etc.?
Answer: Commerce and Spending Clauses of the Constitution

Question: When did the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the Constitution allow federal power to begin expanding?
Answer: start of the 20th century

Question: What is a law enacted by Congress that states that it refuses to regulate some industries as long as the states have regulations in place already?
Answer: McCarran-Ferguson Act

Question: What happens when both the federal and state governments have regulations that overlap?
Answer: coexist with each other

Question: Who signs a bill into a law?
Answer: the President

Question: Where does a bill go after it is signed?
Answer: Office of the Federal Register (OFR) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Question: What is a new law given at the OFR of the NARA?
Answer: a law number

Question: After being given a law number, a new law is prepared for publication as what?
Answer: a slip law

Question: What kind of laws are not given statutory citation by the OFR?
Answer: private laws

Question: Where does a bill go once the President signs it into effect?
Answer: delivered to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Question: What happens after a bill is delivered to the OFR?
Answer: assigned a law number

Question: After a bill is assigned a number, what is it made ready for?
Answer: publication as a slip law

Question: Once the slip laws are placed into the United States Statutes at Large, what are they called?
Answer: session laws

Question: What is the United States Statutes at Large?
Answer: a chronological arrangement of the laws in the exact order that they have been enacted

Question: What does congress often grant to give rulemaking authority to federal agencies?
Answer: statutes

Question: Federal agencies are authorized to make what public?
Answer: regulations

Question: Regulations normally carry the force of what?
Answer: law

Question: Regualtions carry force of law when based on reasonable interpretation of what?
Answer: relevant statutes

Question: What power is granted to federal agencies by Congress?
Answer: broad rulemaking authority

Question: Why does Congress give generalized powers to federal agencies?
Answer: too gridlocked to draft detailed statutes that explain how the agency should react to every possible situation

Question: What gives regulations imposed by federal agencies the right to enforce their regulations?
Answer: the principle of Chevron

Question: What does the Principle of Chevron provide for?
Answer: regulations normally carry the force of law as long as they are based on a reasonable interpretation of the relevant statutes

Question: What is used to determine whether federal judicial power extends to formulating binding precedent?
Answer: stare decisis

Question: What is stare decisis?
Answer: the act of deciding a case becomes a limited form of lawmaking in itself

Question: Why is stare decisis a limited form of lawmaking?
Answer: an appellate court's rulings will thereby bind itself and lower courts in future cases

Question: Who else does stare decisis affect?
Answer: impliedly binds all persons within the court's jurisdiction

Question: Who has noted that binding precedent did not exist when the Constitution was written?
Answer: federal judge Alex Kozinski

Question: Why were decisions not reported or recoded correctly?
Answer: reporters often simply rewrote or failed to publish decisions which they disliked

Question: What are the natural theories of law that that the English judges in the eighteenth century used?
Answer: law was believed to have an existence independent of what individual judges said

Question: Why could one judge reject another judges opinion?
Answer: saw themselves as merely declaring the law which had always theoretically existed, and not as making the law

Question: Why would one judge reject another's opinion?
Answer: incorrect statement of the law

Question: How did the federal agencies differ from their English counter-parts?
Answer: no plenary reception statute at the federal level that continued the common law

Question: What did the missing plenary reception do?
Answer: granted federal courts the power to formulate legal precedent

Question: Where do the federal courts fall?
Answer: the federal Judiciary Acts

Question: Where is judicial power found in the original Constitution?
Answer: Article Three

Question: What does Article Three give federal agencies?
Answer: implied judicial power of common law courts to formulate persuasive precedent

Question: When did binding precedent become possible in the United States?
Answer: nineteenth century

Question: What made binding precedent a possibility?
Answer: creation of a clear court hierarchy (under the Judiciary Acts), and the beginning of regular verbatim publication of U.S. appellate decisions by West Publishing

Question: What can invalidate the rule of law?
Answer: hopeless inefficiency, instability, and unpredictability

Question: Why was the rule of precedent allowed?
Answer: in the absence of case law, it would be completely unworkable for every minor issue in every legal case to be briefed, argued, and decided

Question: How is a court hierarchy established?
Answer: the Judiciary Acts

Question: What states that there is no general federal common law?
Answer: the doctrine of Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins

Question: When was the doctrine of Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins put into effect?
Answer: 1938

Question: Why can't federal courts just make up law?
Answer: lack the plenary power possessed by state courts

Question: When are states allowed to use plenary power?
Answer: absence of constitutional or statutory provisions replacing the common law

Question: What is a major implication of the Erie doctrine?
Answer: federal courts cannot dictate the content of state law when there is no federal issue

Question: What are states not bound by?
Answer: federal interpretations of state law

Question: What states that deference is one way only?
Answer: Erie doctrine

Question: What does it mean when Erie states that deference is one way only?
Answer: state courts are not bound by federal interpretations of state law

Question: What does each state posess?
Answer: state constitutions, state governments, and state courts

Question: What are the 50 states in the Union known as?
Answer: separate sovereigns

Question: Which ranch applies, interprets, and occasionally overturns both state statutes and regulations?
Answer: judicial branch

Question: What branch of government enacts state statutes?
Answer: legislative branch

Question: Which branch of government promulgates state regulations?
Answer: executive branch

Question: Where are cases usually argued?
Answer: state courts

Question: What types of cases are argued in the state courts?
Answer: involve claims and defenses under state laws

Question: How many new cases were filed in 2010?
Answer: 103.5 million

Question: What types of cases did federal district courts receive in 2010?
Answer: 282,000 new civil cases, 77,000 new criminal cases, and 1.5 million bankruptcy cases