November 11: The Information Power and Its Discontents

Description:
The federal executive wields vast power to determine what official information reaches the public. The public relies on this information to conduct research, do business, and make countless health, economic, and personal decisions. Official data form the basis for a shared public reality that makes self governance possible.

Agencies enjoy significant discretion regarding what official information to publish and how, when, and whether to publish in the first instance. This is the information power. Although there is a loose assemblage of statutes, executive directives, and internal agency rules that govern some of these decisions, most are discretionary. Courts, Congress, scholars, and even agencies themselves are not quite sure what to do about them.

This Article makes three principal contributions:

• Describe the information power as a form of executive authority distinct from rulemaking, adjudication, and enforcement, encompassing agency decisions to collect, create, preserve, organize, interpret, disseminate, and alter official information.
• Identify the assorted statutes, directives, and internal rules that apply as information policy and demonstrate how the legal architecture has not kept pace with the sprawling informational architecture it purports to govern, including documenting how information policy has evolved and how the power has been abused.
• Confront the challenge of how to constrain abuses without preventing agencies from deciding how best to alert and inform the public, offering principles for checking abuses of the information power while protecting public trust through transparency, procedure, methodological integrity, and accountability.

The executive information power may be inevitable, but its concentration is not. The task for law is to preserve the government capacity to produce authoritative information while preventing any administration from becoming its sole and unaccountable arbiter.

Title:
The Information Power and Its Discontents

Webinar Date+Time:
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Noon ET | 11 AM CT | 10 AM MT | 9 AM PT
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Speaker:

Professor Nathan Cortez

Professor Nathan Cortez, Co Director of the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation and the inaugural Adelfa Botello Callejo Endowed Professor of Law in Leadership and Latino Studies. He teaches and writes in the areas of health law, administrative law, and FDA law, focusing on emerging markets in health care and biotechnology. He is a leading scholar on medical tourism and cross border health markets and has published widely on mobile health technologies, big data analytics, innovation under aging regulatory frameworks, First Amendment constraints on FDA regulation, immigration federalism, and alternative modes of regulation.

By:
Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Credit:
Approval Pending: Ohio.

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