An unprecedented surge in immigration cases—now approximately 90% of the federal administrative docket—has arrived just as the Court is whittling the judicial role while expanding agency authority, significantly transforming traditional deference doctrine. The Court has shifted the judicial role away from questions of statutory interpretation and towards a mere evaluation of when the agency’s interpretation should be granted deference. Assessment of the “reasonableness” of the agency’s action has given way to marking the outer boundaries of agency action, merging the court’s traditional oversight analysis into a form of “arbitrary and capriciousness” review.

The costs of the Court’s reformulation of Chevron are particularly visible in immigration law because recent legislation and structural changes at the agency have already constrained judicial review. The reformulation of Chevron beginning in immigration law threatens to remake administrative law generally. Unfortunately, it has received little scholarly scrutiny. Understanding this transformation is imperative as ultimately we may be heading towards “Chevron without the Courts”—where the judicial interpretive role is being constrained at the very time agencies are least able to fulfill their interpretive role.

his banking transformation is also particularly significant in light of its distinctive structure among contemporary financial powers. One unique aspect of the Chinese banking system is the way it straddles the lines between the private and public spheres in ways unfamiliar to western banking systems. As the recent financial crisis has demonstrated, these tensions between public and private in the financial realm are also manifesting in traditionally market-based regimes. China, however, is charting the opposite path from most western regimes—China is moving away from a largely public banking model to a more privatized model, albeit one with “Chinese Characteristics”. The development of the modern Chinese banking system, and specifically the emergence of its current mixed public/private banking structure, has received altogether too little attention in the West. The successes and failures of the internal Chinese transition thus offers important lessons to other countries and policymakers as the current global banking crisis deepens.

The Chinese banking transformation also has larger, more long-term global implications. While China is ostensibly just modernizing its banking system, purportedly conducting its own brand of market reform, in reality China has taken advantage of the robustness of its banking system to strengthen its own financial power, both subtly and explicitly, as banking structures in other countries struggle and weaken. In particular, China is attempting to use its financial might to extract financial and political concessions from other countries. Several recent financial developments highlight China’s growing power and their broader implications for the global financial arena.

Finally, in an era where many countries, scholars, and key financial and political players are proposing a myriad of “solutions” to financial problems and crises, a broader dialogue is required over the range of potential solutions to systems such as China’s, where such solutions may ultimately emerge. We all must be concerned with the question set forth in the tile of these remarks—are China’s banking reforms aimed simply at domestic modernization or are they an integral part of China’s bid for global political and financial power?

While much attention has been focused on the Department of Justice’s recent attempts to shield executive power from the reach of Congress, its efforts to undermine judicial review have so far escaped such scrutiny. Yet the streamlining rules have had far-reaching doctrinal and practical consequences. They have led to chaos at the agency, where the emphasis in immigration adjudication has explicitly shifted away from reliance on standards and precedents towards increased reliance on discretionary, and often arbitrary, decision making. Immigration appeals have flooded the federal courts, nearly doubling the size of some circuit caseloads, while trapping the courts in a doctrinal quandary between competing duties of judicial review and agency deference.

This Article argues that if left unchecked, the Department of Justice’s streamlining reforms will eviscerate judicial review, turning it into an illusory exercise incapable of restraining agency action. Not only will agency decision making become less rule- and law-based, but significant spheres of agency action will be rendered immune from judicial review, corroding the rule of law in our judicial system. This evisceration of judicial review is unwarranted and unwise. To help stem this erosion, this Article proposes more nuanced interpretations of deference and judicial review principles which can resolve the dilemmas facing the federal courts and preserve the vitality of judicial review over agency decisions.