BCFC/Shutterstock.com(Incrementally) Toward a More Libertarian Bureaucracy
In response to: A Modest Proposal for Reforming the Administrative State
The ambitious proposal reconsidering the foundations of the modern regulatory state that Ilan Wurman outlines in his thoughtful Liberty Forum essay is not an outlier. There seems to be a growing call—primarily among conservatives and libertarians—to return to first principles and rein in the administrative state. And I’m not just referring to Philip Hamburger’s condemnation of the administrative state as unlawful. Just last year, the Chief Justice’s opinion for the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell reinvigorated the “major questions” doctrine, providing for plenary review of agency statutory interpretations that implicate questions of “deep economic and political significance.” In Michigan v.…
More Responses
Most everyone is familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen tale in which only a child is willing to pronounce what everyone knows: The emperor’s clothes are no clothes at all. As the emperor marches through town, he is as naked as the day he was born. His magnificent new outfit is a fiction, but a…
In his provocative Liberty Forum essay, Ilan Wurman proposes a novel solution to the explosive growth of the administrative state. Constitutional conservatives, rather than pursuing their dream remedy (that is, the Supreme Court overturning or severely limiting its prior holdings on the non-delegation doctrine), should accept that agencies will inevitably exercise a blend of executive,…
I would very much like to thank professors Chris Walker, Jonathan Adler, and Andy Grewal for their thoughtful and incisive responses to my “modest” (or perhaps not so modest) proposal for reforming the administrative state. Much of their criticisms, I think, will be addressed in the forthcoming, fuller accounts of this idea, but much of…
Administrative Adjudication: Even Worse than it Looks?
Like many others at the moment, I am making my way through Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? One of the most shocking chapters is his chapter on America’s “Return to Extralegal Adjudication,” a problem that constitutional law had originally aimed to constrain, but which has re-emerged in the context of the modern administrative state.
I knew that there were problems with administrative adjudication – I just didn’t grasp how pervasive the problems were until Hamburger laid them out so systematically.
