Every era has its unique challenges, but history may still offer lessons on how law empowers and restrains presidents. This Essay examines how President Lincoln negotiated the tension between crisis authority and the rule of law. This analysis requires an appreciation of the wartime imperatives, institutions, and political forces confronting Lincoln, as well as the legal framework in which he acted. Similar issues unexpectedly arose in our times in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, providing a new point of comparison with Lincoln's era. We need to better understand how political actors and institutions, the media, and public opinion can provide support for legal norms, lest we place all of our trust in presidential self-restraint and good judgment.
Conflict between agencies and outsiders-whether private stakeholders, state governments, or Congress-is the primary focus of administrative law. But battles also rage within the administrative state: federal agencies, or actors within them, are the adversaries. Recent examples abound. In President Obama's administration, there was the battle between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense over hacking the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, the conflict between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency over classifying some aspects of Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails, and the sharp division between the Republican and Democratic members of the Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality. President Trump's administration has begun with intense internal conflict. After President Trump issued his first immigration executive order, fights started-largely between holdover appointees (as well as career bureaucrats) and the new boss. Battles have also erupted among President Trump's chosen lieutenants in the White House and in the cabinet. While the President has denounced his opponents, he is also fostering conflict by choosing cabinet secretaries with whom he knows he has policy disagreements, placing loyalists in key agency staff positions as monitors, and selecting adversaries for top White House slots. This Article draws on rich institutional accounts to illuminate and classify the plethora of agency conflicts and dispute resolution mechanisms. Then, by applying social scientific work on agency and firm design, as well as constitutional theory, we aim to explain the creation of such conflict-largely by Congress and the White House but sometimes by the courts- and to evaluate its desirability. We assess the characteristics of conflict against economic, political, and philosophical criteria to suggest lessons for institutional design in the modern administrative state. In contrast to much of the existing literature, we focus on the potentially positive contribution of agency conflict to effective democratic governance. Finally, we use our descriptive, positive, and normative work on agency conflict to contribute to longstanding legal debates and to flag important legal issues that have generated little attention. For instance, we investigate the constitutional limits of congressionally or judicially created conflict within the executive branch, the application of deference doctrines in the face of agency disagreement, and the ability of agencies to take conflicting positions directly or indirectly in the courts themselves.
The reality of the modern administrative state diverges considerably from the series of assumptions underlying the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and classic judicial decisions that followed the APA reviewing agency actions. Those assumptions call for statutory directives to be implemented by one agency led by Senate-confirmed presidential appointees with decision-making authority. The implementation (in the form of a discrete action) is presumed to be through statutorily mandated procedures and criteria, with judicial review to determine whether the reasons given by the agency at the time of its action match the delegated directions. This is the lost world of administrative law, though it is what students largely still learn. Today, there are often statutory and executive directives to be implemented by multiple agencies often missing confirmed leaders, where ultimate decision-making authority may rest outside of those agencies. The process of implementation is also through mandates in both statutes and executive orders, where the final result faces limited, if any, oversight by the courts. The mismatch has consequences for the legitimacy and efficacy of the federal bureaucracy: some positive, many negative. Because we do not think a return to the lost world is possible or perhaps even desirable, we propose some possible reforms in all three branches of the federal government to strengthen the match between current realities and administrative law and to further administrative law's objectives of transparency, rule of law, and reasoned implementation of statutory mandates. We also hope that the proposed reforms can help foster the public interest goals of modern regulation, such as environmental quality or financial stability. We realize that many scholars and probably at least some judges are aware that formal administrative procedures, official records, and judicial review are only part of the dynamics of administrative governance. But administrative law, as developed by the courts and in governing statutes, has not meaningfully confronted the contemporary realities of the administrative state. It thus risks becoming irrelevant to the quality of governance.
The reality of the modern administrative state diverges considerably from the series of assumptions underlying the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and classic judicial decisions that followed the APA reviewing agency actions. Those assumptions call for statutory directives to be implemented by one agency led by Senate-confirmed presidential appointees with decision-making authority. The implementation (in the form of a discrete action) is presumed to be through statutorily mandated procedures and criteria, with judicial review to determine whether the reasons given by the agency at the time of its action match the delegated directions. This is the lost world of administrative law, though it is what students largely still learn. Today, there are often statutory and executive directives to be implemented by multiple agencies often missing confirmed leaders, where ultimate decision-making authority may rest outside of those agencies. The process of implementation is also through mandates in both statutes and executive orders, where the final result faces limited, if any, oversight by the courts. The mismatch has consequences for the legitimacy and efficacy of the federal bureaucracy: some positive, many negative. Because we do not think a return to the lost world is possible or perhaps even desirable, we propose some possible reforms in all three branches of the federal government to strengthen the match between current realities and administrative law and to further administrative law's objectives of transparency, rule of law, and reasoned implementation of statutory mandates. We also hope that the proposed reforms can help foster the public interest goals of modern regulation, such as environmental quality or financial stability. We realize that many scholars and probably at least some judges are aware that formal administrative procedures, official records, and judicial review are only part of the dynamics of administrative governance. But administrative law, as developed by the courts and in governing statutes, has not meaningfully confronted the contemporary realities of the administrative state. It thus risks becoming irrelevant to the quality of governance.
