Earlier this year, George Mason University law professor Frank Buckley suggested in a speech to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society that American government is growing closer to the type of royal government the Founders rejected more than 230 years ago.
Buckley’s speech came to mind as this reader perused the latest issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger compares the rise of administrative law to the return of the prerogative power of kings.
The constitutional history of the past thousand years in common law countries records the repeated ebb and flow of absolutism on the one side and law on the other. English kings were widely expected to rule through law. They had Parliament for making law and courts of law for adjudicating cases, and they were expected to govern through the acts of these bodies. But kings were discontent with governing through the law and often acted on their own. The personal power that kings exercised when evading the law was called prerogative power.
Whereas ordinarily kings bound their subjects through statutes passed by Parliament, when exercising prerogative power they bound subjects through proclamations or decrees—or what we today call rules or regulations. Whereas ordinarily kings would repeal old statutes by obtaining new statutes, when exercising prerogative power they issued dispensations and suspensions—or what we today call waivers. Whereas ordinarily kings enforced the law through the courts of law, when exercising prerogative power they enforced their commands through their prerogative courts—courts such as the King’s Council, the Star Chamber, and the High Commission—or what we today call administrative courts. Ordinarily, English judges resolved legal disputes in accordance with their independent judgment regarding the law. But when kings exercised prerogative power, they expected deference from judges, both to their own decrees and to the holdings and interpretations of their extra-legal prerogative courts.
Although England did not have a full separation of powers of the sort written into the American Constitution, it did have a basic division of powers. Parliament had the power to make laws, the law courts had the power to adjudicate, and the king had the power to exercise force. But when kings acted through prerogative power, they or their prerogative courts exercised all government powers, overriding these divisions. For example, the Star Chamber could make regulations, as well as prosecute and adjudicate infractions. And defenders of this sort of prerogative power were not squeamish about describing it as absolute power. Absolutism was their justification. …
… [O]ver the past 120 years, Americans have reestablished the very sort of power that the Constitution most centrally forbade. Administrative law is extra-legal in that it binds Americans not through law but through other mechanisms—not through statutes but through regulations—and not through the decisions of courts but through other adjudications. It is supra-legal in that it requires judges to put aside their independent judgment and defer to administrative power as if it were above the law—which our judges do far more systematically than even the worst of 17th century English judges. And it is consolidated in that it combines the three powers of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—in administrative agencies.
