Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach
Foundation Press, Doctrine & Practice Series 2021
5 Pages Posted: 10 May 2021
Date Written: May 10, 2021
Abstract
New casebooks can be hard to justify. Many legal doctrines and their canonical cases are well established. But few fields are more in need of fresh thinking than administrative law. My new casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach, newly out with Foundation Press, seeks to provide such thinking. To my knowledge, it is the only administrative law casebook with the words “theory” and “fundamentals” in its title. And the reason might be that there is at present no coherent theory regarding the nature of administrative power. And the debates surrounding administrative power, on the part of both proponents and opponents of administrative government, have stalled.
The new casebook proposes a theory of administrative power that better explains constitutional text and structure, as well as historical and modern practice, than competing accounts. It argues that there are “exclusive” powers that only Congress, the President, and the courts can respectively exercise, but also “nonexclusive” powers that can be exercised by more than one branch. This theory of “nonexclusive powers” allows students and scholars of administrative law to make more sense of—or better critiques of—administrative concepts such as delegation, quasi-powers, judicial deference, agency adjudications, the chameleon-like quality of government power, and of the separation of powers more broadly. This five-page introduction seeks to situate this theory within the existing administrative law scholarship.
Keywords: Administrative law, separation of powers, delegation, nondelegation, nonexclusive power, exclusive power, executive power, judicial power, legislative power, removal, adjudication, rulemaking, administration
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