This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and

Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of

Laud at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago a man of many hats.

Richard, big news in the world of the administrative state, you know, something that you and I get excited talking about as a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision looks like it will lop off a huge chunk of power at state regulatory agencies like the FTC and the

SEC. So please give our listeners some context about this case the Axon case and by

implication the ICC versus Cochran case, and why it should matter to,

I think, the everyday person out there.

Yeah, look, I mean, the problem that we understand is that the successor failure of

substantive legal theories often depend upon the procedural context in which

they are raised. So to ordinary laymen whether you appeal first before you decide something on the merits is a kind of an ignorant detail

They don't know about it. They don't care about it. They've never encountered it in their lives

I've never appealed anything like this in my life Richard.

I well and the point is most people don't and so what happens is one of the things

that you do when you teach first-year student civil procedure is all of a sudden

these rules that sort of grease the wheels or don't

grease the wheels to getting a final judgment on the merits turn out to be enormously

important and I think it's fair to say that in any litigation that you have

are the procedural framework that is the background for the substance of

dispute is at least half the particular battle and so Laura spend their time fighting over standing over

ripeness over appealability and all the rest of that stuff because they know that

it matters and matters big time. Well in terms of the administrative agencies

the major complaint that most people would like to raise about them myself included

...