Executive Action: Its History, its Dilemmas, and its Potential Remedies

Abstract

Concerns about the rule of law in the modern administrative state are not only the result of our current legal system, but of our historical experience. Our legal tradition provides us with no precedents for imposing rules on executive power or authority. English kings created two institutions, the common law courts and the legislature (Parliament), in part to extend his control over the nobles. These institutions gradually acquired independent power and reduced the authority of the monarchy. They did not do so, however, by imposing controls, or standards of behavior, on the king's executive authority. Rather, they reduced the scope his authority, taking command of one field after another. In the process of defining and justifying their newly developed roles, the courts and the legislature established procedures and decision-making standards for their own actions that embodied the rule of law.Thus we, as heirs to English legal and constitutional thought, know how to impose the rule of law on judicial and administrative action. But we have not inherited any standards for executive action; our historical experience teaches us how to limit its scope but not how to control its content. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) reflects this historical and cultural lacuna. It contains elaborate standards for adjudication, modeled on judicial procedure, and at least rudimentary standards for rulemaking, modeled on legislative procedure. But it provides no standards for executive action, and in fact, does not even recognize such action as a category. We know that category as informal adjudication, an obvious misnomer that does not appear in the language of the Act, but has been concocted by observers based on the Act's implicit structure. The unsolved problem in administrative law is to impose rules on action that falls within that category, that is, executive action, without impairing government’s ability to act. Methods for doing so could include substantive standards such as rationality, imposed by a revised APA and enforced by courts, or new supervisory institutions such as an the ombudsperson, or new procedural requirements, such as a revision of the APA notice and comment provisions that would be based on the concept of policy making rather than legislation by elected representatives.