Government agencies regulate Americans in the full range of their lives, including their political participation, their economic endeavors, and their personal conduct. Administrative power has thus become pervasively intrusive. But is this power constitutional?
A similar sort of power was once used by English kings, and this book shows that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, administrative power revives absolutism. On this foundation, the book explains how administrative power denies Americans their basic constitutional freedoms, such as jury rights and due process. No other feature of American government violates as many constitutional provisions or is more profoundly threatening. As a result, administrative power is the key civil liberties issue of our era.
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He writes on constitutional law, including religious liberty, freedom of speech and the press, administrative power, and unconstitutional conditions. His previous books are
Separation of Church and State(Harvard 2002),
Law and Judicial Duty(Harvard 2008), and
Is Administrative Law Unlawful?(Chicago 2014). He received a BA from Princeton and JD from Yale. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded the Sutherland Prize twice, the Henry Paolucci/Walter Bagehot Book Award, the Hayek Book Prize, and the Bradley Prize.