Luke A. Wake
Attorney
Pacific Legal Foundation
Luke A. Wake
Attorney
Pacific Legal Foundation
Luke A. Wake is an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Prior to joining PLF, he was a senior staff attorney at the NFIB Small Business Legal Center.
Wake has particular expertise on environmental and land use issues, and has worked on numerous other constitutional issues and matters of importance to small business owners. He is an ardent defender of private property rights, which he believes are essential to the free enterprise system and the foundation of American liberty. As a strong advocate of individual rights and economic liberties, he has built his career defending small business interests.
Wake has focused on a whole host of issues, from employment law matters to regulatory compliance. In addition to serving as a resource for small business owners, Wake is committed to ensuring that the voice of small business is heard in the nation’s courts. As an appellate practitioner, Wake has focused particularly on informing the courts on matters of administrative law and on issues under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. He is also working to advance small business interests in law review articles, and was recently published in the Berkeley Journal of Law & Ecology. See R.S. Radford & Luke A. Wake, Deciphering and Extrapolating: Searching for Sense in Penn Central, 38 Ecology L.Q. 731, 746-747 (2011).
Before joining the Legal Center’s team, Wake completed a prestigious two-year fellowship as an attorney in the Pacific Legal Foundation’s College of Public Interest Law. Wake is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland Ohio, and is a member of the California Bar. He completed his undergraduate studies at Elon University in North Carolina in 2006 where he focused on political theory and corporate communications.
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Contributions
Deep Dive Episode 217 – The Separation of Powers, From Washington to Sacramento
An expert panel debates the distinctions between the federal and state separation of powers doctrines, using California as an example.
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The Separation of Powers, From Washington to Sacramento
An expert panel debates the distinctions between the federal and state separation of powers doctrines, using California as an example.
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Deep Dive Episode 214 – Emergency Management Statutes: Lessons from COVID-19
An expert panel debated whether states should reform their emergency management statutes in light of our experience with emergency governance over the past 24 months.
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Emergency Management Statutes: Lessons from COVID-19
An expert panel debated whether states should reform their emergency management statutes in light of our experience with emergency governance over the past 24 months.
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Explainer Episode 32 – The Vaccine Mandate Cases and the Future of Administrative Law
An expert panel breaks down the implications of the Supreme Court’s vaccine mandate rulings for the future of administrative law.
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Deep Dive Episode 194 – Examining the CDC’s Eviction Moratorium
Top experts dive deep into the legal issues surrounding the CDC’s eviction moratorium and the relief sought by both landlords and renters.
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Examining the CDC’s Eviction Moratorium
Top experts dive deep into the legal issues surrounding the CDC’s eviction moratorium and the relief sought by both landlords and renters.
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Deep Dive Episode 157 – Regulating Land Use During a Pandemic
What role do policymakers have to play in facilitating efficient land use during this uncertain time? Experts debate.
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Deep Dive Episode 150 – Regulating Business in the Age of COVID-19
In this live podcast, Brian Kabateck, Luke Wake, and Clark Neily address vital questions raised by COVID-19, including whether this is the right time for states to liberalize economic regulations more generally.
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Explainer Episode 2 – The Dynamex Decision and its Implications for Independent Contractors
In this episode, Luke Wake explores the implications of the recent California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex v. Superior Court for small business owners in California.
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Deep Dive Episode 53 – Analyzing the Regulatory Thicket
Brooks Rainwater and Luke Wake explore whether we should maintain the status quo, seek to scale-back existing regulation, and/or winnow existing regulatory regimes.
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Resolute: Navigating the Regulatory Thicket
Founded by Caleb Cook in 2001 and run today with his wife Lois, America’s Phone Guys provides telecommunications and VoIP phone services to businesses in and around the Portland, Oregon metro area. As a home-based business, they encounter a complex web of regulatory requirements and grapple with the compliance burdens caused by the accumulation of individual federal, state, and local regulations.
In this Fourth Branch video, Cary Coglianese (University of Pennsylvania Law School) and Luke A. Wake (NFIB Small Business Legal Center) join Caleb and Lois to explore this web — dubbed the “regulatory thicket” by some. What does the regulatory thicket look like in practice? How does it affect small business owners, their employees, and their customers? Taken as a whole, are the benefits of multiple layers of regulation worth the costs?
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