Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP) Seminar

Key developments in just the last five years threaten to upend the decades-long consensus (roughly speaking) about the constitutional legitimacy of the administrative state, and the expectations of Congress, the President, and the courts in empowering and supervising agencies. A sharp turn toward skepticism about agencies – what has been labelled "anti-administrativism" – has yielded blockbuster Supreme Court decisions curtailing both the power of agencies and of Congress. The Court has the opportunity in the coming months to make other significant changes to the structure of the administrative state; and speculation is common about whether and to what extent recent changes are merely the harbinger of a more coherent attack on the historic consensus.

Many legal scholars have evaluated this movement from a distinctly normative perspective. My objective, building upon work with prominent social scientists who have long worked on scholarship in the positive political theory tradition, is to consider some of the more interesting positive and historical dimensions of this new administrative law. What is truly new? What motivates these multi-institutional efforts? What does it augur for the structure of regulatory administration in the U.S., at least in the short and intermediate term?