This text attempts to provide a new perspective on public administration. It argues that since the 1940s, administrative science has been preoccupied with the attempt to uncover causal relationships rather than concern itself with assembling and identifying the commonest administrative doctrines.
“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.
This edited volume presents selected works from the 20th Biennial Alta Argumentation Conference, sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensics Association and held in 2017. The conference brought together scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America to engage in intensive conversations about how argument functions in our increasingly networked society. The essays discuss four aspects of networked argument. Some examine arguments occurring in online networks, seeking to both understand and respond more effectively to the acute changes underway in the information age. Others focus on offline networks to identify historical and contemporary resources available to advocates in the modern day. Still others discuss the value-added of including argumentation scholars on interdisciplinary research teams analyzing a diverse range of subjects, including science, education, health, law, economics, history, security, and media. Finally, the remainder network argumentation theories explore how the interactions between and among existing theories offer fruitful ground for new insights for the field of argumentation studies. The wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches employed in Networking Argument make this volume a unique compilation of perspectives for understanding urgent and sustaining issues facing our society.
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
Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty. As troubling as this trend has become, there are ways to reverse it. The Fall of the Faculty outlines how we can revamp the system so that real educators can regain their voice in curriculum policy.
The idea of administrative justice is central to the British system of public law, more embracing than judicial review, or even administrative law itself. It embraces all the mechanisms designed to achieve a proper balance between the exercise of public and quasi-public power and those affected by the exercise of that power. This book contains revised versions of the papers given at the International Conference on Administrative Justice held in Bristol in 1997. Forty years after the publication of the Franks Committee report on Tribunals and Inquiries, the conference reflected on developments since then and sought to provoke debate about how the future might unfold. Participants included policy makers, tribunal chairs and ombudsmen, other decision-takers as well as academics - a formidable combination of expertise in the operation of the administrative justice system. Among the themes addressed in the papers are the following: the effect of the changing nature of the state on current institutions; human rights and administrative justice; the relationship between decision taking, reviews of decisions, and the adjudication of appeals; and the overview of administrative justice, taking into account lessons from abroad. The new millenium provides an opportunity for the reappraisal of the British system of administrative justice; this volume presents an indispenable repository of the ideas needed to understand how that system should develop over the coming years. Contributors: Michael Adler, Margaret Allars, Dame Elizabeth Anson, Lord Archer of Sandwell, Michael Barnes, Julia Black, Christa Christensen, David Clark, Gwynn Davis, Godfrey Cole, Suzanne Day, Julian Farrand, Tamara Goriely, Michael Harris (Ed), Neville Harris, Tony Holland, Terence Ison, Christine Lally, Douglas Lewis, Rosemary Lyster, Aileen McHarg, Walter Merricks, Linda Mulcahy, Stephen Oliver, Alan Page, Martin Partington (Ed), David Pearl, Jane Pearson, Paulyn Marrinan Quinn, John Raine, Andrew Rein, Alan Robertson, Roy Sainsbury, John Scampion, Chris Shepley, Caroline Sheppard, Patricia Thomas, Brian Thompson, Nick Wikeley, Tom Williams, Jane Worthington, Richard Young.
The rise of the administrative state is the most significant political development in American politics over the past century. While our Constitution separates powers into three branches, and requires that the laws are made by elected representatives in the Congress, today most policies are made by unelected officials in agencies where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are combined. This threatens constitutionalism and the rule of law. This book examines the history of administrative power in America and argues that modern administrative law has failed to protect the principles of American constitutionalism as effectively as earlier approaches to regulation and administration.
In this synthesis of political philosophy, public administration, and American history, Rohr seeks to legitimize the administrative state in terms of constitutional principle. He tries to show that the fourth (or administrative) branch of government is compatible with the plans of the framers--both Federalist and anti-Federalist-of the U.S. Constitution and of the Bill of Rights. He argues that the combination of powers in administrative agencies does not violate the standard of separation of powers set forth in The Federalist (especially by James Madison); the higher reaches of the career civil service fulfill the framers' constitutional design by performing a balancing function originally assigned to the Senate; and the career civil service en masse heals the defect of inadequate representation in the Federal Constitution. ISBN 0-7006-0291-7 : $29.95.