The FCC, Cable TV, and Visions of Valhalla: Judicial Scrutiny of Complex Rulemaking and Institutional Competence

A number of recent decisions by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, its counterpart for the Eighth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court, have substantially curtailed the power of the FCC to regulate the growth of cable television. Such regulation has proved to be a very complicated and extended saga of FCC activity, one measure of which was the extraordinary justification for publishing a per curiam opinion in Home Box Office, Inc. v. FCC: "not because it has received less than full consideration by the court, but because the complexity of the issues raised on appeal made it useful to share the effort required to draft this opinion among the members of the panel."