Richard Epstein - The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law

R ichard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law; the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School, where he is a Senior Lecturer. He has taught a wide array of both public and private law courses and has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics. Among his many books are Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (1985), Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), How Progressives Re-wrote the Constitution (2006), and the Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014). He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and received the Bradley Prize in 2011, as well as honorary degrees from the University of Ghent (2003) and the University Siegen (2018), and was designated an honorary professor at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences I 2003. His column The Libertarian has appeared weekly in the Defining Ideas Journal of the Hoover Institution since 2008, and he has published widely in such places as the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He podcasts include Law Talk with John Yoo and Troy Senik, the Libertarian with Troy Senik, Reasonable Disagreements with Adam White, and is a regular guest on the John Batchelor Show.

This book was written in less than one year, thanks crucially to my student research assistants at the New York University School of Law. Their contributions went beyond the careful attention to detail that is necessary to round any manuscript into shape. They also pushed me to cover subjects that I had either slighted or overlooked. In so doing, these students helped me to expand a short essay into a systematic volume that looks at administrative law, not only as a body of separate doctrine but as an area of rich interconnections to private and public law. So a heartfelt thanks to Tiberius Davis, William Dawley, Kenneth Hershey, Kenneth Lee, Matt Pociask, Jeremy Rozansky, Joseph Scopelitis, Benjamin Silver, and Nathaniel Tisa.

I also want to thank Larry Mone and Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute for sponsoring this book. The Institutes James Copland, Rafael Mangual, Howard Dickman, and Troy Senik were instrumental in urging me to finish the task in a timely fashion. Thanks to Jana Weinstein and Janice Meyerson for their meticulous copyediting of a manuscript that was, until the final moments, in a constant state of flux. Thanks as well to Jamie Meggas, Manhattan Institutes senior designer.

And last, I want to thank my wife, Eileen, who has learned over the years to live with a distracted husband, and my children, their spouses, and their children for all the moral and social support over the years. As William Rainey Harper has said, we are one in spirit, not necessarily in opinion.

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