Synopses & Reviews
Is administrative law unlawful? This provocative question has become all the more significant with the expansion of the modern administrative state. 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 Constitutionand constitutions in generalwere 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 perniciousand profoundly unlawfulreturn to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.
Review
“
Is Administrative Law Unlawful? is a work of the very highest quality, a learned scholarly exegesis setting out the intellectual foundations—in medieval and early modern English constitutional thought—for the proposition that the contemporary American administrative state is profoundly unconstitutional and unlawful. Philip Hamburger’s argument is intricately wrought and forcefully expressed. Its indictment of modern administration in America doubles as a major statement on the virtues of a genuinely constitutional government.”
Review
"With characteristic erudition, Philip Hamburger shows how virtually every aspect of the modern administrative state undermines the Anglo-American legal tradition—or at least that part of the tradition that most informed the American founding. It is a provocative thesis, but one that is amply supported by extensive scholarly argument and fascinating historical study. Hamburger makes an impressive case that modern administrative law owes its lineage to claims of monarchical prerogative and civil law absolutism that were precisely the ideas that the American revolution was trying to reject. This is a tremendously important book."
Review
“An important new book that is very much worth reading."
Review
"The most important book I have read in a long time."
Review
“The administrative state is a modern invention. It was, and remains, a necessity in our complex modern age. Or so goes the argument. . . . Hamburger meticulously (and sometimes laboriously) demonstrates how the modern administrative state revives all the attributes of the royal prerogative and absolute power.”
Review
“A serious work of legal scholarship. . . . This is a book that rewards the reader with a deepened understanding of the Constitution and the challenges that confront us in the task of restoration. . . . The news of the day repeatedly buttresses the powerful case Hamburger makes against the legitimacy of the vast administrative apparatus that does so much to dictate the way we live now. It is a book not only of this season but of many seasons to come.”
Review
“An interesting new work by Philip Hamburger dispenses with the tiresome back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. Instead, it focuses on Washingtons permanent administration—the ever-expanding federal bureaucracies that have come to play a central role in health care, finance, housing and work, and large roles in education, energy and whatever else constitutes the American system. . . . Hamburgers book is filled with details of how the centralisation of power divorced from a popular or court mandate leads to insularity and even insurrection as hopes of efficiency and expertise give way to bureaucratic inertia.”
Synopsis
Today, administrative law is the usual means used by the federal government to create regulations. Most commentators usually trace the origins of administrative law to the 1930s, seeing it as a response to modern circumstances which could not have been anticipated by the Constitution. Philip Hamburgers provocative book offers a revisionist account that shows administrative law to be, instead, more closely related to the much older tradition of royal prerogative. Rather than a novel power necessitated by modernized society, he shows administrative law to have its roots in an ancient and persistent sort of power, one which enabled rulers to exert their will through a mechanism other than the law. His massive historical account of absolute power, and the responses to it, spans the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments sporadically attempted to confine the Crown to governing through the law, but the most effective response was the development of constitutional law in the seventeenth century. Englishmen then put an end to binding prerogative powers by concluding that their constitution required their government to rule only through the law and the courts. Hamburger argues that the U.S. Constitution imposed such requirements even more vigorously, but that the prerogative power re-emerged here as the modern administrative state under FDR began to take shape. Since then, administrative law has transformed American government and society. For Hamburger, administrative law represents a kind of absolute power that our Constitutionand constitutions in generalwere designed to prevent.
About the Author
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of Law and Judicial Duty and Separation of Church and State.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
1. The Debate
2. Conceptual Framework
I . EXTRALEGAL LEGISLATION
3. Proclamations
4. Interpretation, Regulation, and Taxation
5. Suspending and Dispensing Powers
6. Lawful Executive Acts Adjacent to Legislation
7. Return to Extralegal Legislation
I I . EXTRALEGAL ADJUDICATION
8. Prerogative Courts
9. Without Judges and Juries
10. Inquisitorial Process
11. Prerogative Orders and Warrants
12. Lawful Executive Acts Adjacent to Adjudication
13. Return to Extralegal Adjudication
14. Rule through the Law and the Courts of Law
I I I . SUPRALEGAL POWER AND JUDICIAL DEFERENCE
15. Deference
16. Return to Deference
IV. CONSOLIDATED POWER
17. Unspecialized
18. Undivided
19. Unrepresentative
20. Subdelegated
21. Unfederal
V. ABSOLUTE POWER
22. Absolutism
23. Necessity
24. The German Connection
25. Obstacles
CONCLUSION
Notes
Index of Cases
General Index