Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

March 17, 2017|Administrative State, Eric Posner, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Neil Gorsuch, Woodrow Wilson

Posner and Gorsuch

As the Senate prepares to question Judge Neil Gorsuch for possible appointment to the Supreme Court, my former colleague Eric Posner asks: “Is Gorsuch a Hamburgerian?” Posner thereby attempts to set up Gorsuch by associating him with . . . not really me, nor my scholarship, but a boogeyman of Posner’s imagination.

The version of my scholarship Posner presents to the world is almost unrecognizable: “Hamburger is anti-elite”; “Hamburger is anti-foreigner”; “Hamburger is anti-executive.” These views bear no resemblance to my scholarship or my personal opinions, and it therefore is necessary to state my views as they really are.

September 15, 2014|Administrative State, Declaration of Independence, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger, Prerogative Power, Rechtstaat

Erasing the Fundamental Commitments of American Constitutionalism

by Joseph Postell|

Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? is a timely and major contribution to the most significant constitutional crisis of our time. As a work of scholarship it will inform and inspire future thinking on the administrative state for years. This book, however, will greatly contribute to an emerging consensus about the perils of the administrative state, and help shape the constitutional response. Therefore it may well be the most important book that has been written in decades. Scholars have been denouncing the modern administrative state as incompatible with American constitutionalism for years, but nobody has made the argument as thoroughly and…

September 4, 2014|Administrative Law, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger, Progressivism

Philip Hamburger’s German Connection, and Mine: Part I

by Michael S. Greve|

The Federal Administrative Court of Germany

Chapter 24 in Philip Hamburger’s brilliant book on—or rather against—administrative law is entitled “The German Connection.” The Progressive architects of administrative law—Frank Goodnow; Ernst Freund; John Burgess and apparently the rest of Columbia Law School; Woodrow Wilson—all admired the Germans’ post-Hegelian, “scientific” approach to administration. Many had studied at German universities. And so America acquired what she’d never had before: administration. The rule of “experts,” outside constitutional channels and constraints.

July 31, 2014|Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger

Introducing Philip Hamburger as August’s Guest Blogger

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

I am beaming with delight to announce that Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at the Columbia University School of Law, will be joining Law and Liberty for the month of August as a guest blogger. You might have heard of his latest impressive work of scholarship Is Administrative Law Unlawful? My podcast with Prof. Hamburger earlier this month explores his exposition on the extralegal capacity of the administrative state. Progressives claim that law-making executive agencies are a necessity for organizing a large commercial and urban society, but Hamburger convincingly argues that it really is a…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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