Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

As the argument goes: Over the last hundred years or so, Congress has steadily delegated away its lawmaking responsibility through broad grants of rule-making and discretionary authority to an unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy. And the US Court, in decisions such as Chevron and Auer v Robbins, has similarly relinquished any right it once asserted to oversee the interpretation and performance of that delegated authority. On this reading, the sprawling federal administrative apparatus, which touches on virtually every aspect of American life, exists in contravention of the proper division of powers under the Constitution and is, therefore, not legitimate. In Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (“Law & Leviathan”), Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule set out to confront this (in their view, exaggerated) narrative and to inspire some conservative confidence in the administrative state. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This book review is available in Osgoode Hall Law Journal: https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/ iss1/10