Event Title
The New Administrative Law - With the Same Old Judges in It
Location
Duke Law School
Start Date
1-3-1991 11:30 AM
End Date
1-3-1991 12:30 PM
Description
Twelve years of reviewing administrative decisions brings to mind The Witching Hour, the current best seller by Anne Rice.1 In it, a Lucifer-like spirit called Lasher roams through several generations of a New Orleans family. In each generation, a female family member, also a witch, acts as the medium for calling Lasher into being. At various times, depending on the nature of the witch, his spirit heals and nourishes; at other times it maims and destroys. Always, however, there is a seductive relationship between the spirit and the earthbound witch-they entice, thrill, and eventually take over one another, body and soul. This description is probably as good as any of what administrators and judges do with statutory spirits: New relationships form in each generation and the statutory spirit itself takes on new forms-sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Our friends in academia are not innocent bystanders. Invariably, they also join in the seance, successively urging judges to be more adventurous, skeptical, deferential, or restrained-and now more substantive (in Sunstein's case) and governance-oriented (in Edley's case)-in calling forth the statutory spirit.
Related Paper
Patricia M. Wald, The New Administrative Law—With the Same Old Judges in It, 1991 Duke Law Journal 647-670 (1991)
Available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol40/iss3/3The New Administrative Law - With the Same Old Judges in It
Duke Law School
Twelve years of reviewing administrative decisions brings to mind The Witching Hour, the current best seller by Anne Rice.1 In it, a Lucifer-like spirit called Lasher roams through several generations of a New Orleans family. In each generation, a female family member, also a witch, acts as the medium for calling Lasher into being. At various times, depending on the nature of the witch, his spirit heals and nourishes; at other times it maims and destroys. Always, however, there is a seductive relationship between the spirit and the earthbound witch-they entice, thrill, and eventually take over one another, body and soul. This description is probably as good as any of what administrators and judges do with statutory spirits: New relationships form in each generation and the statutory spirit itself takes on new forms-sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Our friends in academia are not innocent bystanders. Invariably, they also join in the seance, successively urging judges to be more adventurous, skeptical, deferential, or restrained-and now more substantive (in Sunstein's case) and governance-oriented (in Edley's case)-in calling forth the statutory spirit.
Comments
This event was not recorded.