Home / Social Sciences / Politics / Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State

Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State

AUTHORS
Price
€20.90
Upon request
Dispatched within 15 - 25 days.

Add to wishlist

“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

“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

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? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions.

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other.

These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

Authors: Sunstein Cass, Vermeule Adrian
Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780674278691
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2022
  • Introduction: “Long-Continued and Hard-Fought Contentions’
  • 1. The New Coke
  • 2. Law’s Morality, 1: Rules and Discretion
  • 3. Law’s Morality, 2: Consistency and Reliance
  • 4. Law’s Morality, 3: Limits, Trade-offs, and the Judicial Role
  • 5. Surrogate Safeguards in Action
  • Final Words
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index

Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and Chair of a WHO advisory group on behavioral science and health. He was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. He is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution, How Change Happens, Too Much Information (all three published by the MIT Press), Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler), and other books.

Adrian Vermeule is Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to receive our new releases and offers
Your account Your wishlist

This website uses cookies

We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.