Faculty Bibliography

The Supreme Court faces a real dilemma in the Loper Bright case, in which the Court will explicitly consider whether to overrule the Chevron decision. The dilemma is decades in the making, and arises from the interplay of large structural forces, between which the Court is uneasily positioned. On the one hand, the background conditions of the American administrative state, which produce an array of broad and vague delegations to administrative agencies on highly technical subjects, tend to limit the scope of judicial review of agency legal interpretations. On the other hand, the fundamental importance of judicial review of agency legal authority as a legitimating mechanism for the administrative state presses judges towards plenary review of agency legal interpretations. The combination of these two large-scale pressures creates the deference dilemma. It threatens to make plenary judicial review of agency legal interpretations both intolerable and indispensable. In what follows, I explain this basic problem, explore its causes and sources, and speculate about some possible futures for the Chevron framework in particular and the deference dilemma in general. The most interesting possibility is an express overruling of Chevron, combined however with a reframing of “deference” that preserves much of the content of Chevron under a different label. On this reframing, the overruling majority will say — along lines indicated by Henry Monaghan decades ago — that de novo or plenary judicial review of agency legal interpretations is required by legal sources (either by the Administrative Procedure Act, by Article III, or both), yet will also say that de novo interpretation might of course itself yield the conclusion that, in a given statute, Congress has delegated primary responsibility to agencies to fill in statutory gaps or ambiguities.

Among theorists of legal liberalism, a common assumption is that the rule of law, rightly understood, entails some version of the separation of powers — especially the separation of adjudication from the making or enforcement of law. Classical legal theory, by contrast, remains generally agnostic about the separation of powers, but holds that a combination of powers is entirely consistent in principle with a profound commitment to the rule of law and legal justice. On the classical view, no particular institutional technology, including the separation of powers, is defined into the rule of law, so long as the constitutional order as a whole is rationally and adequately ordered to the proper end of law, the general welfare or common good.

On 28th February, William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School delivered the annual Scalia Lecture at Harvard Law School,[2] titled “Beyond Textualism?”—with startling results. Startling but also welcome, as we will explain.

What passes for the American intellectual right is a sorry thing. Indeed, it lacks even the virtues of unity and coherence; in reality, it is fractured, an ever-changing hodgepodge of views and conflicting mini-movements. To the extent there exists any institutional structure at all, it is only to be found on the right wing of liberalism, Conservatism Inc., which coheres in a brittle way only at the price of stasis, recycling nostrums for Reagan’s birthday, policing intellectual challenges, and establishing yet another Center for Madison and Mammon at some nominally Catholic university or other, funded to the tune of $10 million by some calculating donor who suspects Leo XIII was a dangerous socialist.

Both in the history of western law generally and in the American constitutional order in particular, broad delegation that empowers executive government, in conjunction with the administrative state, is not best understood as an alternative and competitor to lawful government by the people. Rather it may be a means of lawful government by the people, an exercise rather than a betrayal of popular sovereignty. In particular, it may be the way in which the people of some given polity have called upon law to protect and enforce popular sovereignty in an oligarchic world, one in which corporations and economic elites exploit and abuse their legal entitlements, including through judicial processes. Delegated executive authority, and the resulting executive and administrative state, might best be seen as a kind of gigantic force that the many have created and deployed to protect themselves from the abuses of the few.

A large academic literature discusses the nondelegation doctrine, which is said to bar Congress from enacting excessively broad or excessively discretionary grants of statutory authority to the executive branch or other agents. The bulk of this literature accepts the existence of the doctrine, and argues only about the terms of its application or the competence of the courts to enforce it. In this essay, we argue that there is no such nondelegation doctrine: A statutory grant of authority to the executive branch or other agents never effects a delegation of legislative power Agents acting within the terms of such a statutory grant are exercising executive power, not legislative power. Our argument is based on an analysis of the text and history of the Constitution, the case law, and a critique of functional defenses of the nondelegation doctrine that have been proposed by academic.

The Original Scalia Adrian Vermeule* What follows is a lightly footnoted version of a lecture delivered at Harvard Law School on October 19, 2022, as part of the Herbert W. Vaughan Academic Program…

In what follows, I offer a short response to a review by William Baude and Stephen Sachs of Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity 2022). The response is by no means exhaustive, but focuses on the central and crippling deficiencies of the review, deficiencies that specialists in jurisprudence have previously pointed out in their work. Baude and Sachs confidently imagine that their particular, highly idiosyncratic versions of positivism and originalism provide the yardstick against which all public law theories should be measured. They present as unquestioned axioms of legality and legal interpretation in our legal order what are, in fact, highly controversial views, which do not correspond to or derive from any recognized version of positivism in jurisprudence. Indeed they go so far as to imply at several points that agreement with their nonstandard approach is the sine qua non of genuine scholarship. Baude and Sachs’ approach in effect tries to pass off as a deep sociolegal consensus claims that are highly contestable and contested, claims for which they provide essentially no evidence.The main consequence of these errors is that Baude and Sachs silently assume away the non-positivist premises of the classical legal tradition. This fundamental error infects all the subsidiary points in the review, which repeatedly misconceive the claims of the classical legal tradition by treating those claims as erroneous or unnecessary positivist arguments, rather than trying to understand them on their own very different terms. Unless and until Baude and Sachs learn to learn, as it were, they will remain unable to engage in any interesting way with the rich variety of American legal theory.

Originalism, textualism and judicial restraint all got short shrift in this term’s major environmental-regulations decision.

This short essay responds to several lectures and talks given by Chief Judge William Pryor Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit critiquing common good constitutionalism. We demonstrate that the arguments advanced by Chief Judge Pryor in favor of originalism badly misfire, permit the very things Judge Pryor wants to rule out, and beg the critical questions about the classical tradition. In the end, they amount to little more than argument by slogan.

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the latest liberal to embrace an approach once associated with conservatives

We offer here a very few thoughts — essentially, only one thought — about a recent argument for a kind of generic originalism. The argument was published by Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, in a draft paper titled “The Moral Authority of Original Meaning.”[1] Given that the paper claims to ground its argument in the classical legal tradition; that it has been heavily promoted by the quasi-official organs of legal originalism, such as the National Review and the Legal Theory Blog; and that the paper is, if nothing else, strikingly ambitious, a brief response seems warranted.

The ninth edition of this classic casebook Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy: Problems, Text, and Cases is streamlined and updated while retaining the previous editions’ rigor, comprehensiveness, and contextual approach.

This essay takes stock of the debate over common good constitutionalism and the revival of the classical legal tradition. In doing so, we suggest that several of the most common critiques of that revival are based on serious misconceptions and question-begging claims, especially for the superiority of originalism.Our hope is to clear away these myths so that actual engagement may occur. We hope to inaugurate a new phase of discussion, one in which critics of the classical legal tradition begin with a baseline comprehension of what it is they are criticizing. In a sense, despite all the sturm und drang, the real debate over common good constitutionalism has yet to begin.Part I sketches the largely ersatz debate so far. Part II introduces the essentials of the classical theory of law and of common good constitutionalism, which is nothing more than the core precepts of the classic legal tradition translated, adapted and applied to current constitutional debates. We do not purport to provide a comprehensive statement of the classical theory, but merely offer an introductory mini-primer, with references to more comprehensive literature. As we will see, the myths we will discuss beg even the elementary questions. Part III explains how the myths are incorrect—or, more precisely, beg the questions in controversy. In the conclusion, we invite genuine engagement with the classical legal tradition.

Following are lightly edited remarks delivered at a panel on “Unwritten Law,” held at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools on January 6, 2022. These informal remarks are of course not intended to be rigorous or comprehensive, merely suggestive. Many thanks to organizer Robert Leider and fellow panelists Jeremy Waldron, Steve Sachs and Ashraf Ahmed for their thoughts and contributions.

The way that Americans understand their Constitution and wider legal tradition has been dominated in recent decades by two exhausted approaches: the originalism of conservatives and the "living constitutionalism" of progressives. Is it time to look for an alternative? Adrian Vermeule argues that the alternative has been there, buried in the American legal tradition, all along. He shows that US law was, from the founding, subsumed within the broad framework of the classical legal tradition, which conceives law as "a reasoned ordering to the common good." In this view, law's purpose is to promote the goods a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. He shows how this legacy has been lost, despite still being implicit within American public law, and convincingly argues for its recovery in the form of "common good constitutionalism." This erudite and brilliantly original book is a vital intervention in America's most significant contemporary legal debate while also being an enduring account of the true nature of law that will resonate for decades with scholars and students.

Professor Nicholas (Nick) Barber’s learned and intelligent book on The Principles of Constitutionalism is best understood as an exercise in Aristotelian naturalism and moral and constitutional realism, of a sort much more characteristic of the classical law than of modern positivism. In view of the book’s implicitly classical approach, it would have benefited, at a number of key junctures, from drawing upon the rich and enduring tradition of the ius commune. Barber often speaks in the register of the classical law, perhaps without knowing it. Doing so more often, and more explicitly, would have improved an already impressive work.

Many presidents have been interested in asserting authority over independent regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board. The underlying debates raise large constitutional questions, above all about the meaning and justification of the idea of a “unitary executive.” In the first instance, however, the president’s authority over independent agencies depends not on the Constitution, but on a common statutory phrase, which allows the president to discharge the heads of such agencies for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” This phrase – the INM standard – is best understood to create a relationship of presidential review — and a particular remedy for legal delinquency flowing from that review. It allows the president to discharge members of independent agencies not only for laziness and torpor (“inefficiency”) or for corruption (“malfeasance”), but also for neglect of their legal duty, which includes egregiously erroneous decisions of policy, law, or fact, either repeatedly or on unusually important matters. Connecting this understanding to the Take Care Clause, we reject both a minimalist approach, which deprives the president of any kind of decisionmaking authority over policy made by independent agencies, and also a maximalist approach, which would treat the independent agencies as essentially identical to executive agencies, in terms of presidential oversight authority. This approach has strong implications for how to understand the President’s directive authority over the independent agencies.

In the theory of the administrative state, a central thread of debate has involved the effect of increasing economic and social complexity on the form of legal instruments. Drawing upon work by Pound, Schmitt and Dworkin, I show that the first two both assumed that the administrative state would increasingly abandon general rules in favor of ad hoc administrative commands — a development that the early Pound welcomed but that Schmitt feared. Ronald Dworkin, by contrast, predicted that the increasing complexity of the modern state would produce ever-greater reliance on relatively abstract legal principles rather than either rules or ad hoc commands. Dworkin’s prediction has largely been borne out in administrative law, particularly the law of judicial review of agency action. That body of law has developed over time by turning to abstract and general principles of rationality and procedural validity to maintain the public edifice of legality.

Under the U.S. Constitution, is the executive branch unitary, and if so, in what sense? For many decades, there has been a sharp dispute between those who believe in a strongly unitary presidency, in accordance with the idea that the president must have unrestricted removal power over high-level officials entrusted with implementation of federal law, and those who believe in a weakly unitary presidency, in accordance with the view that Congress may, under the Necessary and Proper Clause, restrict the president’s removal power, so long as the restriction does not prevent the president from carrying out his constitutionally specified functions. Both positions can claim support from the original understanding of relevant clauses; both can claim to keep faith with constitutional commitments in light of dramatically changed circumstances, above all the rise of the modern administrative state. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a sharply divided Court enthusiastically embraced the strongly unitary position, in an ambiguous opinion that might be read to preserve the constitutionality of independent multimember commissions, but that also left a great deal of room for constitutional challenges to such commissions in their present form. The Court’s analysis purports to be rooted in the original understanding of the constitution, and not implausibly so; but the Court relies so heavily on abstract principles, such as “liberty” and “accountability,” that its analysis is not easily distinguishable from a dynamic constitutionalism suffused with political morality. The Court’s holding and analysis can thus be seen as a direct outgrowth of modern anxiety, rooted in structural concerns, about the threats posed by a powerful, discretion-wielding administrative apparatus, and a belief that presidential control is an essential safeguard.

Many Americans fear the power of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats – the deep state. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule seek to calm those fears by proposing a moral regime to ensure that government rulemakers behave transparently and don’t abuse their authority. The administrative state may be a Leviathan, but it can be a principled one.

Responding to Jeffrey A. Pojanowski, Neoclassical Administrative Law, 133 HARV.L.REV.852 (2020).

At the Philadelphia convention assembled to draft a new Constitution, Alexander Hamilton argued ‘[e]stablish a weak government and you must at times overleap the bounds. Rome was obliged to create dictators’. Publius then expands upon this argument in several ways in the Federalist. I suggest that Publius identifies a dynamic or mechanism, the ‘Publius Paradox’, that warrants great attention: under particular conditions, excessive weakness of government may become excessive strength. If the bonds of constitutionalism are drawn too tightly, they will be thrown off altogether when circumstances warrant. After illustrating and then analysing this ‘Publius Paradox’, I turn briefly to its implications, the main one being that constitutional law should be cast as a loosely‐fitting garment – particularly the executive component of the constitution and the scope of executive powers.

https://youtu.be/lVFc5dnz7Cw

At the Philadelphia convention assembled to draft a new Constitution, Alexander Hamilton argued “[e]stablish a weak government and you must at times overleap the bounds. Rome was obliged to create dictators.” Publius then expands upon this argument in several ways in the Federalist. I suggest that Publius identifies a dynamic or mechanism, the “Publius Paradox,” that warrants great attention: Under particular conditions, excessive weakness of government may become excessive strength. If the bonds of constitutionalism are drawn too tightly, they will be thrown off altogether when circumstances warrant. After illustrating and then analysing this “Publius Paradox,” I will turn briefly to its implications, the main one being that constitutional law should be cast as a loosely-fitting garment — particularly the executive component of the constitution and the scope of executive powers. 2018 Chorley Lecture, London School of Economics. Lecture video: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AFgS0YbuvpwXhN4&cid=AF47A00F85EB8C77&id=AF47A00F85EB8C77%215252&parId=AF47A00F85EB8C77%213702&o=OneUp

As it has been developed over a period of many decades, administrative law has acquired its own morality, closely related to what Lon Fuller described as the internal morality of law. Reflected in a wide array of seemingly disparate doctrines, but not yet recognized as such, the morality of administrative law includes a set of identifiable principles, often said to reflect the central ingredients of the rule of law. An understanding of the morality of administrative law puts contemporary criticisms of the administrative state in their most plausible light. At the same time, the resulting doctrines do not deserve an unambiguous celebration, because many of them have an ambiguous legal source; because from the welfarist point of view, it is not clear if they are always good ideas; and because it is not clear that judges should enforce them.

The article offers the author's insights on how to engage the liberal empire into Christianity. Topics include the structural hostility of liberalism to the Church and how the Church acts under different political conditions, the association between the Church and politics, and the different options of Christians to engage in politics.

What, if anything, legitimates the administrative state? In this Essay, for the Harvard Law Review’s special issue celebrating the bicentennial of Harvard Law School, I examine three attempts to solve the administrative state’s legitimation problem, offered respectively by James Landis, by Louis Jaffe, and by Elena Kagan. The solutions have a common theme and a common structure: each appeals more or less explicitly to “independence.” Each attempts to find a remedy for distrust of unchecked administrative power, and each attempts to do so by identifying “independent” institutions that will monitor and oversee the bureaucracy. However, each compromises their claims in institutional circumstances where the force of competing values becomes particularly strong. The result is that each theorist ends up adopting a kind of roughly optimizing pluralism of values for the administrative state, a pluralism in which “independence” falls out of the picture as such, and in which the benefits of expertise, political accountability, and legalism all have some claims. Happily, this pluralist, rough, and imperfectly-optimizing approach seems adequate to legitimate the administrative state, at least in the sociological sense of legitimation as public acceptance.

Adrian Vermeule speaks with First Things assistant editor Connor Grubaugh about three books on constitutionalism from a Catholic perspective.

This chapter demystifies Carl Schmitt by interpreting his main insights through the lens of modern social sciences,. There is a large literature in political science on the political foundations of democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. This literature emphasizes that legal rules, by themselves, cannot create a political equilibrium, which always depends on the expectation of political actors that other actors will contribute to preserving the constitutional regime rather than subverting it. This insight allows us to interpret Schmitt’s distinction between legality and legitimacy more concretely than in extant work. There is also a large literature in law and economics on ex ante rules versus ex post standards. Schmitt’s theory of the exception can be understood as an argument that governance through ex post standards, rather than ex ante rules, is inevitable and even desirable where political, economic, or military conditions change rapidly.

We examine exceptional cases in which judges are called upon to pass judgment on the constitution itself. There are three groups of cases. First, in exceptional cases the validity of the constitution and the legal order is thrown into dispute. The court is asked to rule on the legitimacy of the constitution and, by derivation, on the standing of the court and the legal authority of the judge. Second, on some occasions the judge is asked to rule on the transition from one constitutional order to another. This can occur in the aftermath of a revolution, or when the state is acceding to a new constitutional order. Third, there are some cases in which the health of the constitutional order requires the judge to act not merely beyond the law, as it were, but actually contrary to the law. The judge must act contrary to the rules of the legal order, precisely in order to preserve the health of the legal order. We claim that "constitutional decisionism" is inevitable in all three groups of cases. Courts sometimes have no option but to take it upon themselves to rule upon, and indeed to participate in constituting, the validity of the very constitutional order that gives them their authority, in a kind of bootstrapping.

For more than seventy years, courts have deferred to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous regulations. The Auer principle, as is it is now called, has attracted academic criticism and some skepticism within the Supreme Court. But the principle is entirely correct. In the absence of a clear congressional direction, courts should assume that because of their specialized competence, and their greater accountability, agencies are in the best position to decide on the meaning of ambiguous terms. The recent challenges to the Auer principle rest on fragile foundations, including an anachronistic understanding of the nature of interpretation, an overheated argument about the separation of powers, and an empirically unfounded and logically weak argument about agency incentives, which exemplifies what we call "the sign fallacy."

Ronald Dworkin once imagined law as an empire and judges as its princes. But over time, the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state. Adrian Vermeule argues that law has freely abandoned its imperial pretensions, and has done so for internal legal reasons. In area after area, judges and lawyers, working out the logical implications of legal principles, have come to believe that administrators should be granted broad leeway to set policy, determine facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, and even define the boundaries of their own jurisdiction. Agencies have greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront many issues than lawyers and judges do. And as the questions confronting the state involving climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology (to name a few) have become ever more complex, legal logic increasingly indicates that abnegation is the wisest course of action. As Law’s Abnegation makes clear, the state did not shove law out of the way. The judiciary voluntarily relegated itself to the margins of power. The last and greatest triumph of legalism was to depose itself.