The state we are in -- Expert administrative capacity -- Administrative accountability -- Enlightened foundations -- Debating administrative law : from the spoils system to the new deal -- The emergence of administrative law and the limits of legal imagination -- The narrowing of the administrative law imagination -- Administrative competence and the Chevron doctrine -- Hard look review -- Conclusion : towards an enlightened administrative law.
The role of generalist courts in reviewing the work of expert agencies is generally portrayed as either an institutional necessity on the one hand or a Pandora's Box on the other. Courts are expected to ensure the accountability of agency actions through their legal oversight role, yet on matters of science policy they do not have the expertise of the agencies nor can they allow themselves to become amateur policymakers in the course of their review. Given these challenges, we set out to better understand what courts are doing in their review of agency science. We conducted a qualitative examination of the courts' review of challenges to agency scientific choices in the entire set of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Our study revealed an increasingly rigorous and substantive engagement in the courts' review of scientific challenges to the EPA's NAAQS over time that tracked the Agency's own progress in developing rigorous analytical approaches. Our findings, albeit preliminary, suggest the emergence of a constructive partnership between the courts and agencies in science policy in NAAQS cases. In overseeing scientific challenges, the courts appear to serve as a necessary irritant, encouraging the agency to develop much stronger administrative governance and deliberative decisions on complex science-policy issues. Conversely, in developing stronger decisionmaking processes, the resulting agency efforts have a reciprocal, positive impact on the courts' own standards for review. The courts and agencies thus appear to work symbiotically through their mutual efforts on the establishment of rigorous analytical yardsticks to guide the decision process. While our findings may be limited to the NAAQS, which likely present a best case in administrative process, the findings may still offer a grounded, normative model for imagining a constructive and even vital role for generalist courts in technically complex areas of social decision making. ; The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business
This article's investigation into the "agency for legitimacy" proceeds in five steps: Part I introduces the concept of "administrative constitutionalism," which encompasses the debate over what should be the role and nature of public administration to ensure its legitimacy. It then lays out the elements of the rational-instrumental and deliberative-constitutive paradigms and explains how they contribute to administrative constitutionalism respectively from the outside-in and inside-out. Part II provides a brief history of administrative constitutionalism, which reveals there have been ongoing tensions between two paradigms—and thus between outside in and inside out accountability—since the 1880s. Part III elaborates on the authors' argument that the current emphasis on the rational-instrumental model has been administrative constitutionalism unsustainable. Part IV argues that acknowledging and developing the deliberative-constitutive paradigm will strengthen administrative constitutionalism by admitting the existence of agency discretion and by looking for realistic ways to make it accountable. Finally, Part V offers a case study in how the deliberative-constitutive paradigm can contribute to administrative constitutionalism. ; The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business
