Law and Leviathan

Law and Leviathan
Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674247531

From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

Tocqueville's Nightmare

Tocqueville's Nightmare
Author: Daniel R. Ernst
Publisher:
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199920869

Between 1900 and 1940, Americans confronted a puzzle: how could administrative agencies address the nation's troubles without violating individual liberty? From the close reasoning of judges, the self-interest of lawyers, and the machinations of politicians, an answer emerged. 'Judicialize' agencies' procedures, and a 'rule of lawyers' would keep America free.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
Author: Philip Hamburger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022611645X

“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

The Administrative State

The Administrative State
Author: Dwight Waldo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2017-09-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351486330

This classic text, originally published in 1948, is a study of the public administration movement from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.The objectives of The Administrative State are to assist students of administration to view their subject in historical perspective and to appraise the theoretical content of their literature. It is also hoped that this book may assist students of American culture by illuminating an important development of the first half of the twentieth century. It thus should serve political scientists whose interests lie in the field of public administration or in the study of bureaucracy as a political issue; the public administrator interested in the philosophic background of his service; and the historian who seeks an understanding of major governmental developments.This study, now with a new introduction by public policy and administration scholar Hugh Miller, is based upon the various books, articles, pamphlets, reports, and records that make up the literature of public administration, and documents the political response to the modern world that Graham Wallas named the Great Society. It will be of lasting interest to students of political science, government, and American history.

The Administrative Threat

The Administrative Threat
Author: Philip Hamburger
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 159403950X

Government agencies regulate Americans in the full range of their lives, including their political participation, their economic endeavors, and their personal conduct. Administrative power has thus become pervasively intrusive. But is this power constitutional? A similar sort of power was once used by English kings, and this book shows that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, administrative power revives absolutism. On this foundation, the book explains how administrative power denies Americans their basic constitutional freedoms, such as jury rights and due process. No other feature of American government violates as many constitutional provisions or is more profoundly threatening. As a result, administrative power is the key civil liberties issue of our era.

Building a New American State

Building a New American State
Author: Stephen Skowronek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1982-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521288651

Examines the reconstruction of institutional power relationships that had to be negotiated among the courts, the parties, the President, the Congress, and the states in order to accommodate the expansion of national administrative capacities around the turn of the twentieth century.

The Fourth Branch

The Fourth Branch
Author: Brian J. Cook
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-04-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0700632077

In The Fourth Branch: Reconstructing the Administrative State for the Commercial Republic Brian J. Cook confronts head-on the accumulating derangements in the American constitutional system and how the administrative state has contributed to the problems, how it has been a key force in addressing the troubles, and how it can be reformed to serve the system better. The Fourth Branch is anchored in a powerful theory of regime design that guides a freshly comprehensive account of the historical development of successive political economies and administrative states in the United States and provides the normative grounding for more far-reaching constitutional change. Cook calls for a decisive, pattern-breaking response in the form of a constitutional redesign to accommodate a fourth branch, an administrative branch. The Fourth Branch shows that the creation of a fourth administrative branch is consistent with the history and traditions of American constitutionalism. Far more than that, however, the addition of a fourth branch could enhance American constitutionalism by making the separation of powers work better, increasing the likelihood that deliberative lawmaking will occur, strengthening civic capacity and public engagement in governance, and improving both accountability and coordination in the administrative state. By stressing that the administrative state in its current form is both biased toward business and seriously undermined by subordination to the three constitutional branches, Cook contends that neither abandoning the administrative state nor more deeply constitutionalizing or democratizing it within the existing constitutional structure is sufficient to fully legitimate and capitalize on administrative power to serve the public interest. Rather, Cook argues that it is imperative to confront the reality that a fundamental reordering of constitutional arrangements is necessary if the American commercial republic is to recover from its growing disorder and progress further toward its aspirations of liberal justice and limited but vigorous self-rule.

Creating the Administrative Constitution

Creating the Administrative Constitution
Author: Jerry L. Mashaw
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 030018347X

This groundbreaking book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. Contrary to conventional understandings, Mashaw demonstrates that from the very beginning Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority. The legislative and administrative practices of the U.S. Constitution’s first century created an administrative constitution hardly hinted at in its formal text. Beyond describing a history that has previously gone largely unexamined, this book, in the author’s words, will "demonstrate that there has been no precipitous fall from a historical position of separation-of-powers grace to a position of compromise; there is not a new administrative constitution whose legitimacy should be understood as not only contestable but deeply problematic."

The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law

The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law
Author: Richard Epstein Richard Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1538141507

Modern administrative law has been the subject of intense and protracted intellectual debate, from legal theorists to such high-profile judicial confirmations as those conducted for Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. On one side, defenders of limited government argue that the growth of the administrative state threatens traditional ideas of private property, freedom of contract, and limited government. On the other, modern progressives champion a large administrative state that delegates to key agencies in the executive branch, rather than to Congress, broad discretion to implement major social and institutional reforms. In this book, Richard A. Epstein, one of America’s most prominent legal scholars, provides a withering critique of how theadministrative state has gone astray since the New Deal. First examining how federal administrative powers worked well in an earlier age of limited government, dealing with such issues as land grants, patents, tariffs and government employment contracts, Epstein then explains how modern broad mandates for delegated authority are inconsistent with the rule of law and lead to systematic abuse in a wide range of subject matter areas: environmental law; labor law; food and drug law; communications laws, securities law and more. He offers detailed critiques of major administrative laws that are now under reconsideration in the Supreme Court and provides recommendations as to how the Supreme Court can roll back the administrative state in a coherent way.