, but post-hoc rationalization is about reinterpreting something in order to adapt it to the knowledge found. For example: the source of the rule on ex post facto rationalizations is important because the APA does not apply to the president; The APA applies to agencies, and the president is not, the Supreme Court told us in a motion by the Ashwander Avoidance Canon, an agency for APA purposes. So if Congress wants to determine whether it can shove the APA down the president`s throat, it needs to do so more explicitly than it did in the definitions section of Section 551. So far, Congress has not accepted this invitation. Their descriptions of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” and “post hoc reasoning” seem correct. It seems strange to treat them as synonymous, since post-hoc reasoning (like the Qur`an describing black holes) is not necessarily a matter of causality, as is always post hoc ergo propter hoc. Is post hoc ergo propter hoc the same as post-hoc rationalization or is there a difference? All the sources I seem to find only mention post-hoc rationalization as alternative names, but someone told me they were different. Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: “after, therefore”) is an informal error that states: “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.” It is often simply reduced to a post-hoc fallacy. As a logical error of the questionable variety of causes, it differs subtly from the hoc ergo propter hoc error (“with this, that is, because of that”), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological order is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical error where an event appears to be the cause of a subsequent event because it occurred earlier. [1] If the Agency`s regulations are challenged in court, the Agency (or its lawyers in the Main Court) is not (essentially) free to find a new and better reason in a reply.

The court (with a still fairly narrow list of exceptions) will reject justifications that first appear in a pleading as “a posteriori rationalizations”. Certainly, the penalty cannot be as severe if the court refers the case back to the agency, which is then free to replace the new and better reasons with the old and inadequate ones. But agencies don`t like pretrial detention – they`re embarrassing, they consume resources because the case has to be restarted, and they often reset the clock, so the agency either has to enter the retroactive thicket or put the revised regulation into effect only from the date of re-enactment. (The latter reason is why clients can be very satisfied with remand, even though it`s clear they`ll end up losing. In the meantime, a lot of money is being made.) But what if the regulation in question is not an APA rule, but an executive order under a power directly conferred on the president in a statute? The prohibition of retrospective rationalization stems from Justice Marshall`s brilliant statement in Overton Park, which firmly anchors demand in the APA. The form of the ex post error is expressed as follows: I suspect the answer might be no, at least as far as the due process clause is concerned. If the President issues a final decree explicitly referring to the Statute to which he refers, he may not be required to give reasons for his request until his request is challenged in court, unless the law empowering him imposes this obligation (and I suspect that this is not the case, although it would be good if they had brackets, that would allow the courts to say so). Once you are in court, a statement that links the actions of the decree to the objectives and authorizations of the law is clearly due process as part of due process. In the APA regime, however, it could be the feared “post-hoc rationalization” – or a direct violation of Overton Park – since nothing came sooner.

But, as we know, the APA offers you much more than due process, especially since – courts that prefer to conduct legal analysis rather than constitutional exegesis (Ashwander, again) – the existence of the APA has often prevented the extension of the due process revolution to matters covered by the APA regime. However, there are cases where they overlap, such as lucky charms: if someone achieves some kind of success by wearing a lucky charm and attributes their success to the lucky charm, it is both post hoc ergo propter hoc (“I put the lucky charm on before achieving success, so the charm must have caused my success”) and post-hoc (“My success proves because I believed that good luck charms worked”). (All of this is triggered by a discussion with a colleague about a superficial approval decree issued under a statute he is writing about. If anyone knows of an article on this topic, please share.) Therefore, the question arises as to whether something in the due process clause (or something in the statute relied on by the order) can be interpreted as imposing an Overton Park requirement on the president when he issues an order under the law. In addition to Overton Park, the other major modern case in which the Supreme Court states an organization`s obligation to state reasons and the court`s refusal to consider other reasons is SEC v. Chenery Corp. The case arose shortly before the promulgation of the APA, so that, technically, the decision was not an interpretation of the APA, but of general principles of administrative law codified in the APA; tradition dictates SEC v. Chenery as coherent and explanatory for the APA. The decision appears to be based on, but not directly, the fundamental principles of administrative review, a system based on due process (and the doctrine of non-delegation), any more than Overton Park. All this is the law of the horn book. Important. Controversial a little around the edges perhaps.

But otherwise quite quiet. When B is not desirable, this scheme is often combined with the formal error of denying the previous one, provided that the logical opposite is true: avoiding A prevents B.[4] It is a truism of administrative law that an authority must justify a regulation at the time of its promulgation. Whether these are the Agency`s real reasons or not, they must be good reasons; Among other things, the reasons must comply with the requirements of the Enabling Act and be consistent with the facts on which the Agency reasonably relies. “Markel, Collins, & Leib on Criminal Justice and the Family| Main | Ohlin in Nash Equilibrium and International Law (Link Fixed)” Post hoc is a particularly tempting mistake because correlation sometimes suggests causation. The error lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than considering other factors that may be responsible for the result and could exclude the link. [2] There are Muslims who now point to a certain surah in the Qur`an that they believe definitively describes black holes, although it had a completely different meaning before we knew about black holes. A simple example is “the rooster crows just before sunrise; That is why the rooster lets the sun rise. [3] According to this person, Post hoc ergo propter hoc is something like that.