A concise but thorough resource, the guide provides a time-saving reference for the latest case law, and the most recent legislation affecting rulemaking.

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

Federal regulations affect nearly every area of our lives and interest in them is increasing. However, many people have no idea how regulations are developed or how they have an impact on our lives. Regulation: A Primer by Susan Dudley and Jerry Brito provides an accessible overview of regulatory theory, analysis, and practice. The Primer examines the constitutional underpinnings of federal regulation and discusses who writes and enforces regulation and how they do it. Published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, it also provides insights into the different varieties of regulation and how to analyze whether a regulatory proposal makes citizens better or worse off. Each chapter discusses key aspects of regulation and provides further readings for those interested in exploring these topics in more detail.

Rulemaking: How Government Agencies Write Law and Make Policy, Second Edition, is a resource for students and practitioners of political science, public administration, and public policy. The volume provides an in-depth look at how federal agencies make the rules that govern U.S. society. Basic rulemaking procedure, the role of judicial consideration, and historical, practical, and theoretical perspectives on rulemaking are discussed.

Administrative rule is a type of rule centered on devising and implementing regulations governing how we live and how we conduct ourselves economically and politically, and sometimes culturally. The principle feature of this type of rule is the important question about how things should be arranged and for what purpose becomes a bureaucratic matter. Histories of the global south are rarely used to explain contemporary political structures or phenomena. This book uses histories of colonial power and colonial state-making to shed light on administrative government as a form of rule. Prem Kumar Rajaram eloquently presents how administrative power is a social process and the authority and terms of rule derived are tenuous, dependent on producing unitary meaning and direction to diverse political, social and economic relationships and practices.

“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.