Law’s Abnegation

Law’s Abnegation PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974719
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Ronald Dworkin once imagined law as an empire and judges as its princes. But over time, the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state. Adrian Vermeule argues that law has freely abandoned its imperial pretensions, and has done so for internal legal reasons. In area after area, judges and lawyers, working out the logical implications of legal principles, have come to believe that administrators should be granted broad leeway to set policy, determine facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, and even define the boundaries of their own jurisdiction. Agencies have greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront many issues than lawyers and judges do. And as the questions confronting the state involving climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology (to name a few) have become ever more complex, legal logic increasingly indicates that abnegation is the wisest course of action. As Law’s Abnegation makes clear, the state did not shove law out of the way. The judiciary voluntarily relegated itself to the margins of power. The last and greatest triumph of legalism was to depose itself.

Law’s Abnegation

Law’s Abnegation PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974719
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ronald Dworkin once imagined law as an empire and judges as its princes. But over time, the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state. Adrian Vermeule argues that law has freely abandoned its imperial pretensions, and has done so for internal legal reasons. In area after area, judges and lawyers, working out the logical implications of legal principles, have come to believe that administrators should be granted broad leeway to set policy, determine facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, and even define the boundaries of their own jurisdiction. Agencies have greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront many issues than lawyers and judges do. And as the questions confronting the state involving climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology (to name a few) have become ever more complex, legal logic increasingly indicates that abnegation is the wisest course of action. As Law’s Abnegation makes clear, the state did not shove law out of the way. The judiciary voluntarily relegated itself to the margins of power. The last and greatest triumph of legalism was to depose itself.

Judging Under Uncertainty

Judging Under Uncertainty PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022102
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In this book, Adrian Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. He argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty.

Law and Leviathan

Law and Leviathan PDF Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674247531
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Winner of the Scribes Book Award “As brilliantly imaginative as it is urgently timely.” —Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Harvard Law School “At no time more than the present, a defense of expertise-based governance and administration is sorely needed, and this book provides it with gusto.” —Frederick Schauer, author of The Proof 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? America has long been divided over these questions, but the debate has recently taken on more urgency and spilled into the streets. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed so long as public officials are constrained by morality and guided by stable rules. Officials should make clear rules, ensure transparency, and never abuse retroactivity, so that current guidelines are not under constant threat of change. They should make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing contradictory ones. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. In more robust form, they could address some of the concerns of critics who decry the “deep state” and yearn for its downfall. “Has something to offer both critics and supporters...a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of the modern state.” —Review of Politics “The authors freely admit that the administrative state is not perfect. But, they contend, it is far better than its critics allow.” —Wall Street Journal

Tocqueville's Nightmare

Tocqueville's Nightmare PDF Author: Daniel R. Ernst
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199920869
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
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.

Constitutional Coup

Constitutional Coup PDF Author: Jon D. Michaels
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737733
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Americans hate bureaucracy—though they love the services it provides—and demand that government run like a business. Hence today’s privatization revolution. Jon Michaels shows how the fusion of politics and profits commercializes government and consolidates state power in ways the Constitution’s framers endeavored to disaggregate.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Is Administrative Law Unlawful? PDF Author: Philip Hamburger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611645X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
“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 Constitution of Risk

The Constitution of Risk PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043727
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Constitution of Risk is the first book to combine constitutional theory with the theory of risk regulation. The book argues that constitutional rulemaking is best understood as a means of managing political risks. Constitutional law structures and regulates the risks that arise in and from political life, such as an executive coup or military putsch, political abuse of ideological or ethnic minorities, or corrupt self-dealing by officials. The book claims that the best way to manage political risks is an approach it calls "optimizing constitutionalism" - in contrast to the worst-case thinking that underpins "precautionary constitutionalism," a mainstay of liberal constitutional theory. Drawing on a broad range of disciplines such as decision theory, game theory, welfare economics, political science, and psychology, this book advocates constitutional rulemaking undertaken in a spirit of welfare maximization, and offers a corrective to the pervasive and frequently irrational attitude of distrust of official power that is so prominent in American constitutional history and discourse.

Law’s Abnegation

Law’s Abnegation PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971442
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Adrian Vermeule argues that the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state, which has greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront issues such as climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology. The state did not shove lawyers and judges out of the way; they moved freely to the margins of power.

The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law

The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law PDF Author: Richard Epstein Richard Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538141507
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
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.

The Administrative State

The Administrative State PDF Author: Dwight Waldo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351486330
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.