Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State

Winner of the Scribes Book Award

A highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as "the deep state."

"Has something to offer both critics and supporters...a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of the modern state."
--Review of Politics

"At no time more than the present, a defense of expertise-based governance and administration is sorely needed, and this book provides it with gusto."
--Frederick Schauer, author of Thinking Like a Lawyer

"As brilliantly imaginative as it is urgently timely. By identifying an inner morality of administrative law, Sunstein and Vermeule refute the most serious legal and political attacks on the administrative state since the New Deal."
--Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Harvard Law School

Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? America has long been divided over these questions, but the debate has recently taken on more urgency and spilled into the streets. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed so long as public officials are constrained by morality and guided by stable rules. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of key principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials should make clear rules, ensure transparency, and never abuse retroactivity, so that current rules are not under constant threat of change. They should make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other.

These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. In more robust form, they could address some of the concerns of critics who decry the "deep state" and yearn for its downfall.