Tag: administrative state

Fizzy Drink or Fuzzy Thinking?

Questionable arguments in Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s critique of anti-administrativism

I have finally started reading Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State. As it says on the tin, the (very short) book is a defence of the administrative state, and of American administrative law, against criticism by those who ― like me ― would to tear it all, or at least much of it, down. Ostensibly, the book is offered as something of an olive branch, an argument for why those who suspect that the administrative state is inimical to the Rule of Law are mistaken about this, and can, if not embrace powerful government agencies vested with vast discretionary powers, then at least make peace with their existence.

But it gets off to a questionable start in the first chapter, which describes ― and pokes fun at ― anti-administrativist thinking, which Professors Sunstein and Vermeule brand “the New Coke”, ostensibly in reference to Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, whom anti-administrativists like Philip Hamburger regard as a hero of opposition to executive-branch tyranny but presumably also to one of the biggest flops in the history of marketing. I don’t mind the jab ― it is amusing, although of course the Chief Justice’s name doesn’t sound like that Coke. I do mind that the argument is less forthright than it ought to be.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule make two main points in their first chapter. One, which is less interesting both to them and surely to most of their non-American readers, is that there is no particularly strong reason to think that the US Constitution’s original meaning outlaws the modern administrative state. The other, in which they are more invested and which will resonate abroad (indeed they assert, in the introduction, that their argument is “promising … for nations all over the world” (18)), is that the administrative state is essential for government to do its rightful work, and that its critics are mistaken to only focus on its alleged dangers for democracy and liberty. This is what interests me here.

One argument I find objectionable has to with the relationship between the administrative state, liberty, and markets, and the relationship of the law, especially the common law, with all three. While anti-administrativists see the administrative state as a threat to be neutralized,

[f]or the theorists and architects of the modern administrative state, private power, exercised through delegation of legal powers and entitlements by the common law and by market ordering, was itself a threat to individual liberty. Hence vigorous government, checking the abuse of corporate and other private power, was deemed just as indispensable to liberty as were constraints on executive abuse. Consider, for example, the question whether the Social Security Administration, the National Labour Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission are threats to freedom or indispensable to it ― questions on which reasonable people differ. (30)

There are several problems with this. First, the claim that private liberty is just something “delegated by the common law” is, at best, taking sides in a contentious debate. The common law itself did not see things that way. A person is free to do that which the law does not prohibit; he or she does not require the law’s permission.

Second, I think it’s quite fair to say that “vigorous government checking the abuse of … private power” is important. Recall Dicey’s example of Voltaire being “lured off from the table of a Duke, and was thrashed by lackeys in the presence of their noble master” and “unable to obtain either legal or honourable redress”. But to say so is not to answer the questions of what forms of “private power” can legitimately be checked by the state, and how they should be checked. Professors Sunstein and Vermeule want us to assume that refusal to deal is the same thing as a private violence in this regard, and that an administrative agency making law and adjudicating claims that the law it made has been infringed is no different from the police and independent courts enforcing the criminal law. These things don’t follow.

And third, the question Professors Sunstein and Vermeule pose is misleading. Reasonable people really should not differ on whether administrative agencies that can create rules backed by the threat of penal sanctions are a threat to liberty. Of course they are! What reasonable people can differ about is whether, all things considered, the threat is offset by, on the one hand, the good these agencies might do and, on the other, the mechanisms that might be devised for controlling and minimizing it. I think that it’s fair for them to argue that the administrative state does good things and that its critics have an unwisely single-minded worldview (whether or not these arguments ultimately succeed is, of course, a different question). But to deny that the administrative state threatens liberty is to peddle a similarly one-sided set of beliefs.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule go on to give an example of how private law and private power threaten liberty, so that the administrative state is no more coercive than private ordering which it displaces:

If some people have a lot and other people have only a little, it is … not because of purely voluntary achievements and failures, important as those are. It is also because of what the law chose to recognize, protect, or reward. A homeless person, for example, is deprived of access to shelter by virtue of the law of property, which is emphatically coercive. In these circumstances, the creation of modern agencies … did not impose law or coercion where unregulated freedom previously flourished. They substituted one regulatory system for another. (31)

This, again, is quite misleading, and indeed the example comes close to doing the opposite of what Professors Sunstein and Vermeule intend ― it shows the dangers of the administrative state rather than its benefits. A homeless person is not deprived of shelter by “the law of property”, but by refusals to deal on the part of prospective landlords ― and possibly, at one remove, by prospective employers.

I’ll explain why the difference matters presently, but first, it’s important to see that the “law of property” would just as happily assure a person of a home as deny them one. Indeed, when we consider how attempts to interfere with the law of property have fared, we can see that, if anything, it would much rather provide shelter to everyone, as it were. Attempts to abolish private property in land and housing in the Soviet Union did not eliminate homelessness ― but they did result in a dire shortage of housing, such that multiple families were forced to share “communal apartments” with a handful of others if they were lucky, and with dozens if they were not. (My mother was born in such an “apartment” which her parents shared with seven other families.) Less dramatically and closer to us, administrative interference with property rights by means of zoning and building codes raises the cost of housing and prevents enough of it from being built ― which, of course, helps make people homeless in the first place.

In a competitive marketplace, refusal to deal by a prospective landlord or employer will seldom condemn a person to homelessness. Because landlords and employers compete for tenants and employees as much as the latter compete for apartments and jobs, some will moderate their demands to the point when even people who are not well off and/or have limited skills will find something for them. To be sure, some people will still need help ― temporarily in some cases, permanently in others. But this help can take the form of cash transfers, rather than regulation. But once regulation, often enacted by the administrative state, starts restricting the supply of housing or raising the cost of workers beyond what they can produce, refusals to deal by the artificially depressed number of landlords and employers risk becoming much more dramatic. In short, Professors Sunstein and Vermeule, like many well-intentioned pro-administrativists before them, are presenting as solutions mechanisms that often serve to aggravate problems they purport to solve.

This brings me to the last issue I would like to address. Professors Sunstein and Vermeule quote at length a wonderful passage from “The Federalist No. 41“, by James Madison ― a hero for many originalists and supporters of limited government whom they are eager to enlist as an ally to their cause:

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. … [C]ool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule rely on Madison in support of their rejection of “a fallacious mode of reasoning that afflicts the New Coke critics of executive power” ― namely,

selective attention … to the risks of … government action, as opposed to inaction; to the risks arising from the functions of government, as opposed to dysfunctional governments … ; to the risks generated by new powers, as opposed to t he risks arising from old powers that the new powers could be used to counter. (34-35)

This is not altogether unfair: it would indeed be a mistake to only assess government institutions by the potential for abuse of their powers, without asking what good they might be able to do.

But Madison does not stop at this. His affirmative prescription is just as important as his critical point. He says that we must always ask whether a proposed government power “is necessary to the public good”. Put to one side the question of whether the public good is a useful or meaningful metric. (I have just argued that it is not.) It’s Madison’s necessity standard that I want to emphasize. Necessity is a high bar; it is not enough that a proposed power might be advantageous ― it has to be necessary. This is not obviously a prescription for expansive government, let alone for an expansive administrative state. And then, even with necessary powers, Madison says that we must “guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment”. This dovetails nicely with his concern for dispersing and checking powers explored in later (and better-known) papers.

The anti-administrative case isn’t that the administrative state can do no good. Of course it can, sometimes. It is, first, that the administrative state is often actively harmful ― on balance, even accounting for the good it can do ― such that it cannot be regarded as necessary; and, second, that the structure of administrative institutions is such that they fail to provide effectual guardrails against the perversion of their powers. The rest of Law and Leviathan is meant as a response to this last contention and, if its arguent succeeds, it will address part of the anti-administrativists’ concerns. But it will be less important part, as the order of Madison’s requirements makes clear. Devising protections against the abuse of power can only come after we have established that the power is necessary. And anti-administrativists’ concerns on this first front cannot be assuaged by simply pointing to the good that the administrative state might do ― least of all when, as in the example offered by Professors Sunstein and Vermeule ― the good is an illusion that rests on faulty or misleading claims about the nature and effect of coercion in the administrative state and in the market.

Right Is Wrong

What an ordinary case can tell us about the problems of Canadian administrative law

Last month, I wrote here about a decision the Federal Court of Appeal (Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157) which, although a good and faithful application of Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, actually highlighted its conceptual defects. This is another post in the same vein, focusing on the choice of the standard of review in Morningstar v WSIAT, 2021 ONSC 5576 to point out (yet again) that the Vavilov approach to jurisdiction makes no sense. I then also point to a different issue that Morningstar usefully highlights with arguments for the administrative state based on access to justice. If you are tired of my fire-breathing neo-Diceyanism, you can skip to the latter discussion.

As co-blogger Mark Mancini explains in his invaluable Sunday Evening Administrative Review newsletter (subscribe!), the applicant in Morningstar tried to argue that correctness review should apply to a decision of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal to the effect that she was not entitled to bring a civil lawsuit against a former employer and should have pursued administrative remedies instead. The idea was that the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should be policed in much the same way as, Vavilov said, “the jurisdictional boundaries between two or more administrative bodies”, [63] ― that is, by have the court ensure the boundary is drawn correctly. But courts are not “administrative bodies” in the sense the Vavilov majority meant this phrase, and the Divisional Court makes short work of this argument. As Mark suggests, while the reasons it gives are very questionable, the conclusion is clearly correct.

But it shouldn’t be! Ms. Morningstar’s argument was, in Mark’s words, “doomed to failure” under Vavilov, but as a matter of principle it is actually exactly right. The Vavilov majority explains, sensibly, that

the rule of law cannot tolerate conflicting orders and proceedings where they result in a true operational conflict between two administrative bodies, pulling a party in two different and incompatible directions … Members of the public must know where to turn in order to resolve a dispute. … [T]he application of the correctness standard in these cases safeguards predictability, finality and certainty in the law of administrative decision making. [64]

That’s right so far as it goes. But what exactly changes if we replace the phrase “two administrative bodies” in the first sentence with “two adjudicative bodies”, so as to encompass the courts? Are the Rule of Law’s demands for predictability, finality, and certainty suddenly less stringent because a court is involved? Need members of the public not know where to turn in order to resolve a dispute? The Rule of Law applies in exactly the same way to jurisdictional conflicts between courts and tribunals as between tribunals, and should require correctness review in both situations.

It might be objected that this argument ignores the privative clause in the statute at issue in Morningstar. Section 31 of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, 1997 provides that the Tribunal “has exclusive jurisdiction to determine”, among other things, “whether, because of this Act, the right to commence an action is taken away”, and further that “[a] decision of the … Tribunal under this section is final and is not open to question or review in a court”. The true and tart response is: who cares? In Morningstar, the Divisional Court not only questioned and reviewed, but actually quashed the Tribunal’s decision on the question of whether, because of the Act, the applicant’s right to commence an action is taken away.

This isn’t a mistake, of course. Courts already ignore privative clauses, and rightly so. Vavilov explains why. As I pointed out here, it

embraces the Rule of Law principle … clearly and, crucially, as a constraint on the legislative power. According to the Vavilov majority,

Where a court reviews the merits of an administrative decision … the standard of review it applies must reflect the legislature’s intent with respect to the role of the reviewing court, except where giving effect to that intent is precluded by the rule of law. [23; emphasis added]

The majority goes on to specify that “[t]he starting point for the analysis is a presumption that the legislature intended the standard of review to be reasonableness”, [23] but “respect for the rule of law requires courts to apply the standard of correctness for certain types of legal questions”, [53] legislative intent notwithstanding.

If a statute attempted to make anything less than correctness the standard of review for jurisdictional boundaries between two administrative tribunals, Vavilov says that it should be ignored, because the Rule of Law, with its demands of predictability, finality, and certainty, requires it. A privative clause that attempts to exclude altogether review of decisions on the jurisdictional boundary between a tribunal and the ordinary courts should similarly be ignored.

But the Vavilov majority could not bring itself to take that approach, because it would be fatal to the entire conceit of deferential review on questions of law which the Supreme Court embraced in CUPE, Local 963 v New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, [1979] 2 SCR 227, and on various forms of which it has doubled down ever since. As Justice Brown wrote in West Fraser Mills Ltd v British Columbia(Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22, [2018] 1 SCR 635, “in many cases, the distinction between matters of statutory interpretation which implicate truly jurisdictional questions and those going solely to a statutory delegate’s application of its enabling statute will be, at best, elusive”. [124] When an administrative decision-maker is resolving questions of law, notably when it is interpreting the legislation granting it its powers, it is always engaged in the drawing of the boundary between its jurisdiction and that of the courts. To admit ― as one ought to ― that the Rule of Law requires these questions to be resolved by courts would cause the entire structure of Canadian administrative law to come crashing down. And so, to preserve it, Vavilov asks the courts to pretend that things that are actually entirely alike from a Rule of Law perspective are somehow mysteriously different. It is, as I said in the post linked to at the start, an instance of post-truth jurisprudence.

Now to my other point. In a couple of ways, Morningstar reminds me of the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v TeleZone Inc, 2010 SCC 62, [2010] 3 SCR 585. The issue there was whether a litigant who sought private law damages as compensation for an allegedly unlawful act of the federal Crown had, before bringing a civil claim in a provincial superior court, to pursue an application for judicial review in the Federal Court to establish the unlawfulness. It was, in other words, a conflict between remedial regimes potentially open to alleged victims of government wrongdoing. The Federal Court of Appeal had held that such victims had to seek judicial review first; the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that they did not. The Supreme Court agreed with the latter. It noted that following the Federal Court of Appeal’s approach “would relegate the provincial superior courts in such matters to a subordinate and contingent jurisdiction”. [4] It added too that the case was “fundamentally about access to justice. People who claim to be injured by government action should have whatever redress the legal system permits through procedures that minimize unnecessary cost and complexity.” [18]  

Morningstar, like TeleZone involves a conflict between two possible venues for redress, albeit of a private wrong rather than one resulting from government action. Employees who think they have been wronged in the course or during the breakdown of their employment relationship might seek compensation from the administrative regime supervised by the Tribunal or sue the employer in the civil courts. The substantive question in Morningstar was which of these regimes was the appropriate one on the facts. The courts should be able to resolve this conflict without deferring to the views of the venue administering one of these regimes, just as the Supreme Court did not defer to the Federal Court of Appeal in TeleZone. And, to be sure, there is a difference: the Superior Court that would be one of these conflicting jurisdictions would also be the court resolving the jurisdictional conflict. (The Divisional Court is a division of the Superior Court.) But that’s how our system is set up, and it’s not a reason for deferring to the other jurisdiction involved.

But the deeper and perhaps more important similarity between TeleZone ― and, specifically, the approach the Supreme Court rejected in TeleZone ― and Morningstar has to do with the functioning of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act. Its section 31 directs employees and employers to apply to the Tribunal for a ruling on whether they are can go to court, before they can actually litigate their claims ― much like the Federal Court of Appeal in TeleZone said those who consider suing the Crown for damages must first go to the Federal Court and seek judicial review. Former employees might then find themselves in the Divisional Court (and perhaps further in the Court of Appeal) for a judicial review, before they can start litigating the merits of their dispute, if it is one that can be litigated in the Superior Court.

To repeat, in TeleZone, the Supreme Court held that the conflict between competing remedial regimes should be resolved in such a way as to maximize access to justice and minimize cost and complexity. Specifically, this meant that litigants should be able to avoid a pointless journey through the Federal Courts before launching their claims in the Superior Courts. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Act might as well have been designed to do the exact opposite ― maximize cost and complexity and undermine access to justice. Of course, that’s not what the legislature was trying to do. It wanted to preserve the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. The legislature might even say, “hey, it’s not our fault that the Tribunal’s decisions can be judicially reviewed ― we said they can’t”. But the legislature acts against a background of constitutional principles, which have long included the availability of judicial review. It knew that its privative clause is constitutionally meaningless. And still it went ahead and created this nonsensical arrangement, instead of simply allowing the jurisdiction of the Tribunal to be raised, perhaps by way of a motion for summary judgment, in any litigation in the Superior Court.

The creation of administrative mechanisms such as the Tribunal ― and their partial insulation from judicial review by the application of deferential standards of review ― is often said to promote access to justice. Perhaps it might do so in the abstract. If a dispute stays within the confines of an administrative tribunal, it will usually be handled more cheaply than in the courts. But, at the very least, such arguments for the expansion of the administrative state must take into account the reality that multiplying jurisdictions means multiplying conflicts both among them and, even more often, between them and the courts. And the resolution of these conflicts is neither cost-free nor something that can be simply wished away. It’s a reminder that, in public law as elsewhere in heaven and earth, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Morningstar is, in a sense, a rather uninteresting case, at least in the part that I have addressed here. A first-instance judicial review court applies a clear instruction from the Supreme Court and, despite some loose language in its reasons gets it right. But it is still revealing. In Canadian administrative law, courts that do things right, or roughly right, so far as their duty to apply precedent is concerned, are still doing things wrong if we judge them by first principles. This is not a good place for the law to be.

The Disuse of Knowledge in the Administrative State

Regulation is not the right tool for intelligently dealing with complexity

Advocates for the administrative state typically promote it on the basis of its great usefulness in contemporary society. Without the expertise that administrators bring to their work, they say, we could not deal with the complexity of the world around us. Although, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, this is no longer part of the rationale for deference to administrative decision-makers in Canadian law, this view is still widely held by administrative theorists in North America. Indeed it is part of the pro-administrativist critique of Vavilov, for example in a post by Mary Liston over at Administrative Law Matters. But this view is fundamentally wrong, even backwards.

A passage from Matthew Lewans’ book Administrative Law and Judicial Deference captures this traditional view nicely. Compared to the past,

we must tackle a broader array of complex social issues―human rights, immigration, national security, climate change, economic policy, occupational health and safety, public access to health care and education, etc―about which there is deep disagreement. And we cannot hope to address these issues intelligently without harnessing the experience, expertise, and efficiency the modern administrative state provides. (187)

Other pro-administrativists, if they have not themselves written such things, would I think wholeheartedly agree with them. To the extent that I specifically criticize Professor Lewans’ argument, below, it is only in a representative capacity.

One thing to note about this passage, and its innumerable equivalents elsewhere, is that it is not supported by any detailed arguments or evidence. The hopelessness of intelligently dealing with the issues that consume contemporary politics without “harnessing the experience, expertise, and efficiency” of the bureaucracy is simply asserted by writers and taken on faith by readers. But I think we need to query these claims before accepting them, and not because I have watched too much Yes, Minister to have much faith in the experience and expertise, let alone the efficiency, of the administrative state.

More fundamentally, the state ― and especially the administrative state ― often is not merely lousy at addressing complexity intelligently, but actively opposed to doing so. The reason for this is that its laws and regulations, to say nothing of its discretionary rulings, serve to eradicate rather than harness the information needed for intelligent behaviour in a complex world. They give both the rulers who wield them and the citizens who clamour for them the illusion of purposive action and control, while actually preventing the operation of the mechanisms that serve to communicate information about the world much more effectively than laws and regulations ever can: prices and markets.

As F.A. Hayek famously pointed out in “The Use of Knowledge in Society“, there is an enormous amount of information that even the best experts armed with the boundless powers of the modern administrative state cannot acquire: information about the circumstances, needs, and desires of individuals and organizations. This information is unlike the scientific, technical knowledge that experts might be able to centralize in the hands of the bureaucracy. In particular, this local knowledge changes much too quickly to be communicated and assimilated by an authority. As Hayek explains, “the economic problem of society” ― that is, the question of how to use the resources available to us most effectively ― “is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place”. From this,

it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. 

I would add also that, even if a “central board” could acquire information as fast as individuals and businesses, it could not make new rules to reflect this information fast enough, or consistently with the requirements of the Rule of Law, which include the relative stability of the legal framework.

But how do individuals acquire knowledge which, Hayek insists, even a sophisticated bureaucracy cannot gets its hands on? The answer is, through market prices, which reflect aggregate data about the relative scarcity of goods and services available in a given time and place: “Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people” ― which is to say, in any society in which there many people, and especially in complex modern societies to which pro-administrativsts such as Professor Lewans refer, “prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan”.

Hayek gives the example of how, if something people need to produce other things other people need becomes more scarce, such as its price goes up

without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. 

The right direction, that is, from society’s perspective ― the direction of the society’s overall resources being used more effectively where they are most needed. Hayek pointedly describes the functioning of the price mechanism, its ability to economically and quickly communicate information no bureaucracy could gather “by months of investigation” as a “marvel”. He is right.

But, to repeat, the state all too often prevents this marvel from happening. The state outlaws market transactions, and so prevents the communication of information through market prices, left, right, and centre, and interferes with those transactions it doesn’t outlaw. Ronald Reagan summed up the state’s ― and the statists’ ― thinking: “If it Moves, Tax it. If it Keeps Moving, Regulate it. And if it Stops Moving, Subsidize it.” This is not all the state does, of course. The state, if it functions well, also enables markets by keeping peace, protecting property rights, and enforcing contracts. They state may supplement markets by correcting genuine market failures, though these are rather fewer and further between than statists tend to assume. But there’s no denying that much of what the state does, and especially much of what pro-administrativists ― be they on the political left (as most of them have long tended to be) or on the right (as the followers of Adrian Vermeule and other common good will-to-power conservatives, about whom co-blogger Mark Mancini has written here) consists in overriding, displacing, and even criminalizing markets, and so destroying rather than harnessing information. The state not only is stupid; it makes us less intelligent too.

The administrative state, specifically, is especially guilty of this. To quote Professor Lewans once more ― and again, in a representative capacity ―

There are good reasons why legislatures invest administrative officials with decision-making authority. While a legislative assembly might be able to forge sufficient consensus on broadly worded objectives as a platform for  future action, it might reasonably conclude that interpretive disputes regarding those objectives outstrip the capacity of the legislative process. (199)

To be clear, “interpretive disputes” here are disputes about the specification of these “broad objectives”, as well as the means through which the objectives, so defined, are expected to be achieved. What Professor Lewans is saying is that delegation of power to the administration vastly increases the state’s overall ability to regulate ― that is to say, to override, displace, and criminalize markets. Legislatures might never achieve consensus on the detail of a regulation, and so wouldn’t enact any since they need at least a bare-bones consensus to enact law. But thanks to the dark wonders of delegation, the need for consensus is dispensed with, or at least reduced, and more regulation can be enacted. And of course the administrative state is simply bigger than a legislature, so it has more person-hours to expend on producing ever more regulation. The legislative process ― at least, proper legislative process, not what all too often passes for it ― is also time-consuming, while one of the supposed virtues of the administrative state is its flexibility. Faster regulatory change, while it cannot actually be effective enough to substitute or account for the information transmitted through the price system, is more disruptive to markets.

If we actually want to address the issues that confront complex contemporary societies intelligently, the administrative state is not our friend. More often than not, it serves to reinforce the state’s ability, to say nothing of its resolve, to prevent individuals and businesses from acting intelligently in the face of complexity by eliminating or falsifying the information they need to do so. At best, the administrative state then tries to provide a simulacrum of an intelligent response ― as, for example, we ask bureaucrats to puzzle out who may come to our countries to work based on what they, from their cubicles, deem to be market needs, instead of simply opening the borders and letting employers and potential workers make their own arrangements.

Why, then, are people ― and more and more people, too, as the emergence of right-wing pro-administrativsim shows ― so convinced that the administrative state is necessary? Some, alas, are not especially interested in social problems being solved effectively. They even make a virtue of inefficient institutions, slower economic growth, and more coercion. Such feelings may be especially widespread among the common good will-to-power crowd. But more people, I suspect, simply misunderstand the situation. As Hayek pointed out,

those who clamor for “conscious direction” … cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously.

They think that central direction, which only the state, and specifically the administrative state, can provide is necessary. They are mistaken, and in a way that is the sadder because they unwittingly demand the exact opposite of what they actually hope for.

Post-Truth, Redux

A faithful application of Vavilov reasonableness review exposes the rot at the core of Canada’s administrative law

Co-blogger Mark Mancini has already posted on the Federal Court of Appeal’s recent decision in Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157. He argues that it is a good illustration of how courts should review administrative decisions on the reasonableness standard, following the Supreme Court’s instructions in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65. I agree with Mark’s analysis, so far as it goes: as a rigorous application of Vavilov that rightly emphasizes legal constraints on administrative decision-making, Justice Stratas’ reasons for the Court in Alexion are excellent. (In fact, let me highlight an additional passage that Mark does not mention: Justice Stratas notes, rightly, that administrators must interpret statutes “in a genuine, non-tendentious, non-expedient way … Result-oriented analysis is no part of the exercise”. [37] Amen!)

But, in my view they are also an excellent illustration of the considerable flaws of the Vavilov framework, with its insistence on the centrality of administrative reasons on all issues subject to the reasonableness standard of review, including issues of statutory interpretation. Indeed, Alexion illustrates the fundamental soundness of the approach taken in the case that is the great bogeyman of Canadian administrative law: the House of Lords’ Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147. The concurring judges in Vavilov accused the majority of following Anisminic. If only!

As Mark explains in more detail, Alexion reviewed a decision by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board that the company was selling a product “at a price that, in the Board’s opinion, is excessive” (s 83 of the Patent Act). The Court of Appeal invalidated the Board’s decision, holding that it did not explain its reasoning on key issues, including the interpretation of s 85 of the Patent Act, which sets out the criteria the Board must apply in deciding whether the price of a patented medicine is “excessive”. As Justice Stratas notes,

[a]t best, on this point the Board obfuscated, making it impossible for a reviewing court to know whether the Board has helped itself to a power it does not lawfully have. By obfuscating, the Board has effectively put itself beyond review on this point, asking the Court to sign a blank cheque in its favour. … 

[T]he Board may have helped itself to powers the statute has not given it. The absence of a reasoned explanation on certain points means that we cannot be more definitive than that. [44]-[45]

Justice Stratas notes that the Board appears to have found the pricing of Alexion’s product unreasonable, and expresses his “fundamental concern … that the Board has misunderstood the mandate Parliament has given to it under s 85. At a minimum, a reasoned explanation on this is missing“. [48; emphasis mine] And further:

Section 85 speaks of “excessive” pricing, not  “reasonable” pricing. The two seem much different. If in fact they are not different, in the circumstances of this case the Board had to explain why. Nowhere does the Board do so. [52; emphasis mine]

If I may paraphrase Justice Stratas, he is saying: it looks like the Board is doing something it’s not supposed to be doing under the statute, but hey! maybe it’s not do these things, or maybe it can do these things after all ― and we, the Federal Court of Appeal, can’t know for sure. The suggestion here ― that, absent good quality reasons given by the administrator, a reviewing court cannot say whether the administrator, in Justice Stratas’ eloquent words, “helped itself to a power it does not lawfully have” ― is entirely consistent with Vavilov. There the majority insisted that

the focus of reasonableness review must be on the decision actually made by the decision maker …  The role of courts in these circumstances is to review, and they are, at least as a general rule, to refrain from deciding the issue themselves. Accordingly, a court applying the reasonableness standard does not ask what decision it would have made in place of that of the administrative decision maker … conduct a de novo analysis or seek to determine the “correct” solution to the problem. [83]

On this approach, Justice Stratas and his colleagues are not supposed to come to their own view of the meaning of s 85 and verify the Board’s compliance with it. They are confined to assessing the Board’s explanations as to whether it has complied. Absent an explanation, the exercise fails. Vavilov is an improvement over the earlier cases in that, when such failures occur, it allows the reviewing court to stop there and send the matter back to the administrator for a do-over, instead of making up an explanation and deferring to it. (See Mark’s post for more on this).

But to say that Vavilov improves over what I once described as a post-truth jurisprudence requiring judges to play chess with themselves and contrive to lose is not to say much. In fact, Vavilov does not even leave post-truth jurisprudence behind. For how else should we think of a requirement that judges ― of an appellate court, no less ― insist that they “cannot be definitive” about the interpretation of a statutory provision and about whether an administrator “helped itself to a power it does not lawfully have” ― which is to say, exceeded its jurisdiction (there, I said it) in applying that provision?

The truth is that judges can be definitive on such things. The truth is that Justice Stratas has much to say about the meaning of s 85 and the way in which it has to be applied, as well as the more general principles of statutory interpretation (see, in particular, his important caution that “[t]he authentic meaning of the legislation … is the law, not what some politicians may have said about it at some place, at some time, for whatever reason”). [53] (I recently addressed this point here.) The truth is that, as Justice Stratas notes, “[o]ver and over again, authorities have stressed that the excessive pricing provisions in the Patent Act are directed at controlling patent abuse, not reasonable pricing, price-regulation or consumer protection at large”. [50] A jurisprudence that requires a court to assert that, notwithstanding all of this, an administrative tribunal might somehow explain all that away, and show that when it said “reasonable” it meant “excessive”, and that when it “disregarded most of the … authorities”, [51] it still complied with the law, is the jurisprudence of la-la-land.

In reality, the Board’s decision has all the appearances of a textbook example of what Lord Reid in Anisminic described as an administrative tribunal having “misconstrued the provisions giving it power to act so that it failed to deal with the question remitted to it and decided some question which was not remitted to it”. When a tribunal does so, even though in a narrow sense “the tribunal had jurisdiction to enter on the inquiry”, it loses jurisdiction in a broad sense, and the resulting decision is a nullity. Canadian courts should be able to say so ― which means that they should be free, contra Vavilov, to “decide the issue themselves”, without waiting, or even affecting to wait, to be instructed by administrators who lack the legitimacy, the independence, and the competence to speak on questions of law with any real authority.

Why is it that we can’t have nice things? An important part of the problem is the fusion, in Canadian administrative law, of what in the United Kingdom (and New Zealand) are known as legality review and reasonableness review into a (supposedly) unified category of merits review. To make things worse, the Supreme Court remains committed to an oversimplified approach to merits review, such that it almost always has to be conducted on the same reasonableness standard. The reasons-first approach may be suitable for review of fact- or policy-based administrative decisions, but applied to issues of statutory interpretation it leads to Alexion-style absurdity.

What makes Alexion even more galling, though, is the nature of the administrative body it concerns. And that’s not only, and perhaps even so much, that, pursuant to s 91 of the Patent Act the Board’s members can legally be the first five strangers the Minister of Health meets on the street one day ― or hacks. (As I wrote this, I thought I’d look up the Board’s actual membership, in the hope of being able to add a disclaimer to the effect they are all, in fact, wise and experienced experts. Only, there doesn’t seem to be any information about them on the Board’s website. Of course that doesn’t prove that they actually are hacks, let alone people the Minister met on the street, but one might have thought some transparency was in order. UPDATE: Mea culpa. The information is there, however counter-intuitive its presentation may seem to me. The members’ bios are here.)

Worse is the fact that the Board acts as both prosecutor and judge in the cases it handles, the separation of powers be damned. This par for the course in the administrative state, to be sure ― but no less pernicious for all that. I note, for the sake of completeness, that it is “Board Staff” that “filed a Statement of Allegations” against Alexion, rather than Board members ― but staff (pursuant to s 93(2)(b) of the Patent Act) are managed by the Board’s Chairperson, i.e. one of its members. The Board’s internal “separation of powers” is more sham than ersatz.

Why exactly should the views of this judge-and-prosecutor, this two-headed abomination against due process of law, about the meaning of the statute it is charged with applying be entitled to any regard by actual judges? In Vavilov, the Supreme Court insists that this is to respect Parliament’s intent. But, as I have been saying since my first comment on Vavilov here, the Court ignores Parliament’s direction, in s 18.1(4)(c) of the Federal Courts Act that the federal courts grant relief when administrative decision-makers err in law, which clearly requires these courts to come to their own view about what statutes mean and whether the administrator in a give case has complied with the law. In this way too, Vavilov perpetuates Canadian administrative law’s disregard for truth.

In case this needs to be clarified, none of the foregoing is a critique of Justice Stratas and the decision in Alexion. As I said above, I think that the decision is about as good as it could have been while being a faithful application of the Vavilov framework. If the Board takes what Justice Stratas seriously, it will make a much better, and most importantly, a lawful decision next time. It is the framework itself that is rotten.

But the rot set in four decades ago, and no judge of the Federal Court of Appeal can solve them ― even one who has made Herculean efforts to, like Justice Stratas. Perhaps even the Supreme Court cannot fully undo the damage it has inflicted on our law when it turned away from the Anisminic path and waded into the dark forest of deference to the administrative state. But if Alexion illustrates the possibilities ― and the limits ― of what the Supreme Court accomplished in Vavilov, and I think it does, then one has to conclude that the Supreme Court hasn’t tried very hard at all.

Against Administrative Supremacy

A response to the “Guest Posts from the West Coast” Series

This post is co-written with Mark Mancini

Over at Administrative Law Matters, Cristie Ford, Mary Liston, and Alexandra Flynn have published a series of posts critiquing the Supreme Court’s decision in  Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 for what they regard as its departure from the principles of deference to the administrative state that long characterized Canadian administrative law. As we are going to show, this critique reflects a commitment to what Jeffrey Pojanowski describes as “administrative supremacy”, “an unapologetic embrace of the administrative state”. (861)

Yet in our view this critique rests on a distorted representation of the relevant constitutional principles, such as democracy, separation of powers, and the Rule of Law, and of the stakes involved in judicial review. More robust judicial review of administrative decisions ― if indeed that is what Vavilov will lead to, which is not yet clear ― would not cause a dismantling of the administrative state. It should, however, result in an application of the laws enacted by Parliament and the legislatures more in accordance with their terms, which is what the relevant principles, properly understood, require.

Professors Ford, Liston, and Flynn all see Vavilov as a break with a decades-long history of judicial recognition of and deference to the administrative state. Professor Ford writes that “[o]nce upon a time, in the days before the modern administrative state, there was one standard of review for errors of law: correctness”. These pre-historic days ended, however, with a “[g]rudging acknowledgment of administrative tribunals’ jurisdiction, at least in hard cases” in CUPE v NB Liquor Corporation, [1979] 2 SCR 227. Since then, and until Vavilov, the courts would defer to administrative interpretations of law, unless they were unreasonable, perhaps even patently so.

The embrace of deference reflected a certain view of the law, of the institutions of government, and of their relationship with one another. It rested, in Professor Ford’s words, on a “recognition that the rule of law could be a multifaceted, legitimately contestable thing”, part of “a captivating legal pluralist world”. Courts acted with “humility” in the face of “multiple kinds of expertise” embodied by administrative tribunals, accepting “that expertise could even mean knowing what it was like to be the recipient of social benefits”. They also recognized that “administrative tribunals were more diverse and more representative of the population at large than the judiciary was”. For her part, Professor Liston adds that the turn to deference aimed at

realizing the intertwined principles of democracy, parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law; affirming the administrative state as a legitimate fourth branch of government; [and] respecting the separation of powers by minimizing judicial review when the legislature indicates that the decisionmaker has primary jurisdiction to fulfill its mandate and interpret the law in relation to that mandate.

Professors Ford and Liston also both argue that the deferential approach was meant to foster access to justice, but acknowledge that it has ultimately failed to do so. There was too much play in the joints, too many opportunities for argument about the appropriate degree of deference. Judicial review lost its “focus remained on [the] merits” of the cases and became bogged down in “law office metaphysics”, as Professor Liston puts it (citing Justice Binnie).

Vavilov and its companion case Bell Canada v Canada (Attorney General), 2019 SCC 66, however, usher in a radical change. Professor Ford writes that “[t]he velvet glove is off. Vavilov signals a retrenchment by a more assertive, and conservative, Court” (a label that Professor Liston endorses), and that “[w]e are done with letting 1,000 rule of law flowers bloom”. Focusing on Bell (which she describes as “the tell in the shell game that is administrative law”), Professor Liston laments its disregard of administrative expertise, of “the broad grant of discretion” to the CRTC “to make decisions in the public interest that touch on fundamental policy objectives” (reference omitted) and “the democratic and fair process that led to the ultimate decision”, involving protracted consultations and responsive “to the views of ordinary Canadians” who complained to the CRTC about not being able to watch American Super Bowl ads. Instead, Professor Liston sees Bell as having “imported” “political currents from the south”, such as “the libertarian attack on the administrative state”.

As noted above, this view of the administrative state and its relationship with the courts is consistent with Professor Pojanowski’s description of “administrative supremacy”, which

sees the administrative state as a natural, salutary outgrowth of modern governance. In its strongest form, it sees the role of courts and lawyers as limited to checking patently unreasonable exercises of power by the administrative actors who are the core of modern governance. To the extent that durable, legal norms are relevant, the primary responsibility for implementing them in administrative governance falls to executive officials, who balance those norms’ worth against other policy goals. (861)

In our view, the administrative supremacist critique of Vavilov and Bell suffers from two fundamental flaws. On the one hand, the principles on which administrative law rests, and which it purports to apply, do not mean what administrative supremacists think or say they do. On the other, a rejection of administrative supremacy does not necessarily lead to the dismantling of the administrative state, supremacists scare-mongering to the contrary notwithstanding.

Start with the principles. The administrative supremacist view is that democracy is at least equally, if not better, embodied in the decisions of administrative tribunals as in legislation enacted by Parliament or legislatures. For one thing, tribunals are acting pursuant to a mandate from the legislatures. For another, the administrative process itself can be characterized as democratic, as the CRTC’s is in Professor Liston’s post.

Yet it simply isn’t the case that a decision actually made by an appointed official, or even a group of officials, is democratic in the same way as a statute debated and enacted by an elected assembly ― even if the assembly itself gave away its decision-making power to the officials in question. To give an extreme example, if Parliament contented itself with simply delegating its full law-making powers to the Prime Minister, we would not, I hope, regard this as a democratic arrangement, even if it may be legal. Somewhat less extreme but more real and just as undemocratic, the recent briefly-mooted plan to delegate plenary taxing power to the federal government was undemocratic too, and would have been undemocratic even if rubber-stamped by a Parliament content to abdicate its responsibility.

And the possibility of public input into an administrative decision offers no more than a partial correction to the problem. This input need not be in any sense representative of “the views of ordinary Canadians”; it is much more likely to be driven by a small group of motivated activists or rent-seeking economic actors, as the “capture” era of American administrative law demonstrates. Besides, even if the CRTC’s decision-making follows a process that could be described, however precariously, as “democratic”, not all administrative decision-makers operate this way. Consider “line decision-makers”, many of whom follow minimal process before reaching their decisions. Vavilov’s reasoning requirements will likely change what these officials do going forward, but the rank administrative discretion they exercise is not in any sense “democratic” on its own; it can only said to be so by virtue of the delegated power that the decision-makers exercise—nothing more or less.

Administrative supremacy similarly distorts the meaning of separation of powers. While Professor Ford, to her credit, associates this principle with the view that “[t]he courts’ role is to police the executive’s exercise of authority”, Professor Liston writes of “the administrative state as a legitimate fourth branch of government” and considers that separation of powers requires “minimizing judicial review when the legislature indicates that the decisionmaker has primary jurisdiction to fulfill its mandate and interpret the law in relation to that mandate”.

Separation of powers is, to be sure, a slippery and complicated idea, but there is, at its core, the Madisonian view that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”, and further “that each department should have a will of its own”. The administrative “fourth branch” exists precisely to subvert the distinctions between the other three, accumulating in its hands the ability to make policy, execute its decisions, and decide disputes about them. This subversion is compounded by arguments to the effect that the courts can have their core function of saying what the law is taken away from them by legislatures, and that they must defer to legal interpretations propounded by the “fourth branch”, so as to have no will of their own. While Canadian law probably permits the delegation of significant powers to the administrative state, there is a major risk in concentrating these powers. This is why the courts must ensure that administrative decision-makers only exercise those powers actually delegated to them, for the purposes for which they have been granted.

Moreover, the mere fact of delegation does not speak to the intensity of review a court should apply. While the Vavilov Court adopts a presumption of reasonableness based solely on the fact of delegation, this must be considered an organizing default rule that is a product of compromise ― it cannot be defended on the grounds that there is a principled link between delegation and deference. Indeed, the political science literature holds that legislatures may delegate for any number of reasons, none of which have to do with what a court should do on review. Better for a court, in our view, to review the legality of an exercise of administrative power de novo, at least absent some signal from a legislature that it intends deferential review (Vavilov, at [110], outlines some of these signals well).

Last but not least, administrative supremacy embraces a highly misleading view of the Rule of Law. Its proponents suggest that the Rule of Law is possible in ― indeed, that the better understanding of the Rule of Law requires ― a legal environment when legislation has no settled meanings dispassionately elucidated and consistently applied by independent courts. Recycling (and magnifying tenfold) a Maoist metaphor, they would have “1,000 rule of law flowers bloom”, as Professor Ford puts it.

Yet on any serious account of the Rule of Law stable, clear rules, consistently applied so as to create a predictable legal environment, are the heart of this concept. So is the idea that government power is limited by these rules. Judicial control over the meaning of legal rules and over government’s compliance with them is not an ideological caprice, but a necessary corollary of the principle. Only the courts ― not administrative decision-makers subject to control by the executive and invested with an explicit policy-making mission ― are sufficiently independent and can be committed to keeping the government within legal boundaries, as Dicey notes in his Law and Public Opinion. Abstract legal pluralism is, to us, no substitute for the legal certainty which the Rule of Law requires and to the maintenance of which the courts are essential.

And, as far as that point goes, there is another problem with the administrative supremacist argument as it pertains to the Rule of Law. In Professors Liston and Ford’s posts in particular, we see the classic supremacist argument from pluralism and expertise. Encompassed in this ideal is the idea of a “culture of justification” in which expertise could be brought to bear by administrative decision-makers in the reasons justifying administrative action. But there are limits to these principles that Professor Liston does not acknowledge. For one, expertise is not a legal reason for deference. It may be, as Professor Daly notes, an epistemic reason for deference, but what is the legal rationale for a court to abdicate its reviewing function under the Rule of Law in the name of alleged expertise?

Even as an epistemic reason for expertise, the presumption of expertise for all administrative decision-makers, which Professor Liston seems to tacitly endorse, was never justified as a matter of first principle. Indeed, as the Vavilov Court notes, it was impossible to distinguish matters over which administrators were expert from those where they were not. As we know in the prison context, in immigration law, and beyond, decision-makers’ claims to expertise, especially in legal or constitutional interpretation, can be exaggerated or outright unfounded. To give up on the role of the courts in enforcing legal boundaries in the name of unproven assertions of expertise is, in our view, contrary to the Rule of Law.

Our second objection to the administrative supremacist argument can be dealt with more briefly. An administrative law that rejects administrative supremacy and gives effect to the principle of the Rule of Law, properly understood, does not entail the demolition of the administrative state. (For one of us, this is a matter of considerable regret, but it is true all the same.) The administrative state exists in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand, where courts insist on their role of policing the boundaries of its authority, largely without deferring to its legal interpretations. The approach there is summarized in Lord Diplock’s words in the GCHQ case, Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service, [1985] AC 374:

the decision-maker must understand correctly the law that regulates his decision-making power and must give effect to it. Whether he has or not is par excellence a justiciable question to be decided, in the event of dispute, by those persons, the judges, by whom the judicial power of the state is exercisable.

This approach would not prevent the delegation by Parliament or the legislatures of discretionary or adjudicative authority to administrative agencies and tribunals. It would mean, however, that these agencies and tribunals must give effect to the laws that give them their powers and to the general law of the land, rather than to their preferred policies and predilections.

To take up Professor Liston’s example, the CRTC’s view that it would be a good idea to impose some requirement on those subject to its licensing authority does not exhaust the question of its authority to impose this requirement. The question is whether the CRTC actually has this authority, because Parliament has granted it. The administrative state can exist if Parliament or a legislature has willed it into existence. But democracy and separation of powers, no less than the Rule of Law, should lead to the conclusion that the administrative state, and its powers, exist only to the extent that they have been willed into existence, and that their bootstrapping claims deserve scrutiny by the judiciary.

In part, disagreement about deference comes down to how one ought to conceptualize the administrative state. For Professors Liston and Ford in particular, the administrative supremacist view leads to the conclusion that administrative power is to be encouraged; that administrators all have something valuable to say about the law; that a Dyzenhausian view of “deference as respect” best encapsulates the role of courts vis-à-vis administrative actors. We view this as a decidedly Panglossian view of the administrative state. A basic deceit at the core of Canadian administrative law is the tendency for observers to concentrate on the tribunals that best demonstrate, to these observers anyway, the virtue of the administrative state: labour boards and the CRTC, for example. The harder question is what to think of administrative actors that do not fit this mould.

In this respect, Professor Liston and Ford put forward an old view of administrative law that dates back at least to the 1930s and the New Deal ― which is not a good time from which to borrow ideas. A 21st century version of administrative law must contend with the growth of the administrative state into the licensing state, the exclusionary state, and the carceral state; incarnations of the state that, due to a lack of expertise or otherwise, may not be owed respect under the benevolent standards of review Professor Liston wants. Adopting general language of “pluralism” and “expertise” masks the real work: how to legitimize administrative power that is not characterized by the functional reasons for deference, as in Vavilov itself.

Again, this is not an ideological quirk. With respect, we find puzzling the claims that Vavilov is the work of a “conservative” court influenced by “libertarian” “political currents”. Six of the seven members of the Vavilov majority signed the “by the Court” judgment in R v Comeau, 2018 SCC 15, [2018] 1 SCR 342; three were also in the five-judge majority in Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32, [2018] 2 S.C.R. 293. However one might describe these judgments, conservative, let alone libertarian, they were not. People of all persuasions should be concerned about the scope of administrative power, no less than that of legislatures or, say, police forces. And if sometimes this rebounds to the benefit of those actuated by the profit motive, we do not think this is as sinister a possibility as Professor Liston seems to find it.

All in all, we differ from the defenders of administrative supremacy in one fundamental respect. The principles at play—democracy, separation of powers, and the Rule of Law—are not licenses to justify administrative power. Instead, they are properly viewed as constraints on that power. Vavilov was right to reject justifications other than legislative delegation for administrative power, and to insist on meaningful scrutiny of the compliance of the exercise of this power with its legislative warrant. For better or for worse, this will not undermine the administrative state, but the reminder that administrative power is something to be constrained using ordinary legal tools, not unleashed in service of the bureaucratically determined common good, is a salutary one.

How Much Justice Can You Afford?

The trade-offs involved in designing fair administrative procedures

In the last administrative law class before the extended break into which the present plague forced us (and which is about to come to an end, as we resume teaching ― online), I taught procedural fairness. One of the points I tried to impress on my students is that procedural fairness is (like so much else) a matter of trade-offs. More elaborate procedures meant to ensure that administrative decisions are fair to those whom they affect have benefits ― but they have costs too. The question for those who design the procedures to be followed by a given decision-maker ― legislatures, administrative entities (and their legal advisors!), and eventually courts ― is how to optimize these trade-offs.

This point may bear repeating here. I teach New Zealand law, of course, but the principles and indeed the language of Canadian law of procedural fairness is not very different from those to be found in New Zealand or the United Kingdom. Early Canadian cases on the duty of fairness, notably Nicholson v Haldimand-Norfolk Regional Police Commissioners, [1979] 1 SCR 311, referred to a New Zealand appeal decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Furnell v Whangarei High Schools Board, [1973] AC 660. The leading Canadian case, Baker v  Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), [1999] 2 SCR 817, also draws on UK cases to some extent, rather than treating them as utter heresy, in the way Canadian cases on substantive review, notably Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, treat cases like Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission, [1969] 2 AC 147.

In these (and other) cases, trade-offs tend not to be discussed explicitly, which is why I think this post is warranted, even though its claims should be, I think, fairly obvious. The language used is, rather, that of justice, fairness, doing the right thing, and general warmth and fuzziness. In Furnell, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, for the majority , explained that “natural justice is but fairness writ large and juridically. It has been described as ‘fair play in action’”. (679) The majority in Nicholson adopts this passage, as do a number of other Canadian cases. In Baker, Justice L’Heureux-Dubé writes that

the purpose of the participatory rights contained within the duty of procedural fairness is to ensure that administrative decisions are made using a fair and open procedure, appropriate to the decision being made and its statutory, institutional, and social context, with an opportunity for those affected by the decision to put forward their views and evidence fully and have them considered by the decision-maker. [20]

At the same time, however, there is much talk of flexibility. This should be a hint. If the issue were one sided, we would always want to have more fair play, more open procedures, more opportunities for those affected to put forward their views. There would be no need to modulate the duty of fairness; it would be better to maximize it in every case.

And to be, well, fair, to the courts, their recognition of this issue is sometimes explicit. Justice L’Heureux-Dubé’s reference to the “context” of administrative decisions and may well push to expand, as well as to contract, the duty of fairness in a given case. But other judicial statements are less ambiguous. For example, in Cardinal v Director of Kent Institution, [1985] 2 SCR 643, Justice Le Dain insisted that the requirements of fairness he found applicable

are fully compatible with the concern that the process of prison administration, because of its special nature and exigencies, should not be unduly burdened or obstructed by the imposition of unreasonable or inappropriate procedural requirements. (660)

And, more broadly, in a passage from Pearlberg v Varty, quoted in Nicholson, Lord Pearson pointed out that “if there were too much elaboration of procedural safeguards, nothing could be done simply and quickly and cheaply. Administrative or executive efficiency and economy should not be too readily sacrificed”. Such frankness is not always to be found, however. Besides, frank though it is, Lord Pearson’s statement strikes me as still incomplete.

It is true, of course the elaboration of procedural safeguards comes at the cost of efficiency (not necessarily in its technical sense, but simply as speediness) and economy. But not only to the administration. For one thing, the administration here is only a stand-in for government and, in turn, for the voters who mandate it, however indirectly, and for the taxpayers who fund it. So it is worth pondering the fact that the government staffs, and the taxpayers pick up the bill for, the tribunals or other decision-making agencies, and the courts that engage in judicial review. The government, and again the taxpayers, also pay for lawyers who defend administrative decisions. Government officials who provide process for people are also being paid ― and they are taking time out of their schedules that could presumably be used for something else.

But the government and the taxpayers are not the only ones bearing the costs of “the elaboration of procedural safeguards”. So do the affected parties, who are also expending time and resources on process. If you are told that you have a right to be heard and to represented by a lawyer, you’ll want to prepare and to hire a lawyer. That ain’t cheap, in terms of time and money. Each additional opportunity to make submissions, each additional hearing, each additional cross-examination is an invitation to spend more time and money, to say nothing of emotional investment. Administrative decision-making is often said, as for example by the majority in Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 SCC 47, [2016] 2 SCR 293, to be “speedier and less expensive” than adjudication in the courts. But there is no law of nature that says that this must be so, and even if administrative tribunals have a relative advantage, this does not mean that they achieve speed and affordability in some absolute sense.

So administrative procedures imposed in the name of fairness have costs, some of them falling on the administration itself, and some on those being administered. Of course they do have benefits too, and these benefits are also distributed in ways that the language of judicial decisions does not always make obvious. Of course, an opportunity to be heard to be given a decision that one can accept as consistent with fair play even if unsatisfactory are very important benefits ― benefits that have to do with the value of human dignity, as Jeremy Waldron points out (primarily in relation to courts, but the point generalizes) in “The Rule of Law and the Importance of Procedure“. These benefits that accrue primarily to the parties affected by administrative decisions.

But other benefits that are expected to be provided by more elaborate administrative procedures will accrue more widely. There are good governance benefits, for example, resulting from insofar as administrative procedures leading to more, or better, information being taken into account by decision-makers, and this, in turn, translating into more rounded and sensible decisions being made, into local knowledge displacing or at least supplementing the preconceptions of bureaucratic planners. There are Rule of Law benefits from the laws are enforced in a non-arbitrary way, by non-biased officials ― at least provided that the laws are minimally decent. There are even democratic benefits, insofar as voters want those laws enacted by legislatures to exist and be enforced in accordance with their terms (a big, and often unwarranted assumption, to be sure).

And so, to repeat, the question for those who are in charge of desigining administrative procedures is how to balance the costs and the benefits. One general point is that, as with much else, the marginal cost of “the elaboration of procedure safeguards” goes up, while the marginal benefit that it produces goes down. Some elementary duty to appraise a person subject to an administrative procedure of what is going on and an opportunity to make written submissions is likely not to be especially onerous on the either the administration or the affected party, while providing a substantial gain (in terms of making the affected party feel better, of leading to more accurate decisions, etc) over a bureaucrat deciding on a whim in his or her office. The gain from moving from a written procedure to an oral hearing with lawyers and cross-examination may well be less, though it might still be significant ― in some cases (for example, when credibility is in issue), while the cost may well be greater. The gain from having an appeal procedure is likely to be less still: if the decision-maker at first instance was competent, most of his or her decisions will be acceptable, even if the appellate process can improve on them somewhat. For any given decision, there is a point where the costs of additional process will outweigh the benefits. The trick is to find this point, or something near enough to it.

One cannot, I suspect, meaningfully generalize much beyond that, and the courts are right to emphasize the case-by-case nature of the inquiry into the duty of fairness. Different kinds of decisions will have different costs and benefits. Some parties are better able to bear their share of the costs than others. Some decisions are so routine that additional procedural safeguards will yield little advantage. Some decisions are preliminary and defects can be rectified at a later stage.

The trouble is, to repeat, that costs and benefits are both spread among different people and groups of people. It may be that adding or withholding process will provide benefits to some while imposing costs on others. How to balance that is not obvious, to put it mildly. No one group involved in designing administrative procedures ― legislatures, the administration itself, and the courts ― may have a very good understanding of the impacts of their decisions, although the courts typically consider themselves experts in the matter.

What is more, all come to the design process with their own biases that make them overestimate certain costs or benefits. Legislatures are probably concerned to save money (at least all things being equal; sometimes, they have other interests in mind, as becomes apparent from considering the extraordinarily elaborate procedural scheme for teach discipline that was at issue in Furnell). Administrators probably want to save their time and effort. Both may underappreciate the benefits of procedural safeguards, both to affected parties and to society at large. Meanwhile, courts, insofar as they act at the behest of parties dissatisfied with individual decisions and bound to argue that the procedures followed were insufficiently elaborate may lose sight of the costs ― not only to the administration but also to other affected parties, who are not before them ― of additional procedure. Last but not least, it’s worth keeping in mind that lawyers, collectively, tend to benefit from more process. We are also trained to explain to people why more process is a good thing. And it often is! But we are not entirely disinterested when we say so.

The language of fair play and participation ― important though these things are ― should not lull us into losing sight of the unpleasant realities of administrative procedures. More is not always better. There are costs, and trade-offs. We must ― and can do no more than ― try to find the best balance, case by case, statutory scheme by statutory scheme, and labouring under all the severe limitations to which institutional design generally is subject. We cannot have have it all ― affordability and impartiality, expeditiousness and participation. The New Yorker’s cartoonist J.B. Handelsman, though he probably had a somewhat different issue in mind, put it well.

The Common Good Administrative State

The Internet has been captivated by Professor Adrian Vermeule’s provocative essay in The Atlantic on so-called “common good constitutionalism” (CGC). CGC could be describes as part of a larger theory that co-blogger Leonid Sirota calls “right-wing collectivism,” which “blends support for using the power of the state to advance traditional moral values, a hostility to free markets, and nationalism.” CGC picks up the mantle in the legal realm, with Vermeule suggesting that “substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read in the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution” should be the starting point for interpretation. These substantive principles include

…respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality”—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority.

CGC is clearly distinguishable from other political and legal theories of interpretation. It does not ally itself with originalism, in that originalism is not expressly designed to promote certain substantive political aims. On the other hand, CGC does not take freedom of the individual as the dominant good in a polity, as libertarians might. Instead, CGC intends to promote substantive conservative ideals in constitutional law.

This is a rough-and-ready description of CGC, and for those who want a more in-depth description of the theory’s substantive ends, Leonid Sirota has written a post on CGC here, and others have written well-justified critiques of Vermeule’s position. My goal in writing today is to suggest some implications of CGC for administrative law and the delegation of power to administrative agencies. I do not think that a state or court that sets out to accomplish what Vermeule suggests would be able to avoid delegating power to agencies—this Vermeule seems to acknowledge. The question is whether such delegation is desirable, and whether the conservative adherents of Vermeule’s theory would themselves accept an ever-growing administrative (rather than democratic) behemoth.

I first describe what Vermeule says about the administrative state in his controversial piece and a related piece. Then I address some implications of CGC for administrative law and delegation. My view is that CGC depends–crucially–on the administrative state to effectuate its aims. But there is no guarantee that the administrative state can be wielded to achieve those goals.

**

Vermeule spends the majority of his time talking about the ends associated with his CGC, and rightly so: these are controversial aims that run against orthodox opinion and established authority. However, he does devote some time to discussing how his CGC will affect the “structure and distribution of authority within government.” It is worth quoting the entirety of what Vermeule says about administrative agencies and bureaucracy; clearly, these institutions form the means to Vermeule’s ends:

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.

This is the entirety of what Vermeule says about bureaucracy in his piece, but there is a lot of meaning packed in these words. The last link in Vermeule’s comments links to another piece he wrote in which he discusses the ability of the administrative state to actively promote religion. In this piece, Vermeule suggests that “specialization” in administrative agencies is neither here nor there on religion, because “specialization is an intrinsically neutral institutional technology.” Vermeule says, on this basis:

So the administrative state, in my view, is an institutional technology that can be put to good or bad ends, and is no more intrinsically hostile to religion than is, say, the use of written rather than oral communication.

[…]

Let me distinguish two ways the administrative state could be put to beneficial use to promote religion. One is by clearing away legal and economic obstacles to religious practice, obstacles thrown up by other sorts of institutions; another is by directly and affirmatively promoting religious values.

For Vermeule, then, the picture seems to be of an administrative state actively advancing a certain discretionary agenda, perhaps unconstrained by constitutional or legal arguments that might confine that discretion, with the gargantuan task of promoting “solidarity and subsidiarity.” Unfortunately, no matter whether such a state is desirable, I do not find such a state practical in any sense of the term.

**

Consider, first, the supposition that the bureaucracy would be “strong” in itself, acting under a “strong” Presidency. This comment seems to recall the unitary executive theory, under which “whatever authority the executive has must be controlled by the President.” This includes bureaucratic agencies operating under the President. These sorts of agencies can be contrasted with independent agencies, typically styled as such because their heads are removable by the President only for cause (though see Vermeule’s piece here). On the unitary executive theory, bureaucrats fall under the control of the President, exercising his constitutionally-delegated Article II authority.

At first blush, the unitary executive theory might appear to be a normatively desirable way to control bureaucrats. After all, Article II is clear that it is the President who holds the executive power, and so any exercise of that power must be controlled by the President. This theory has infiltrated the Supreme Court of the United States’ cases, particularly the so-called “Peek-a-boo” case (PCAOB v Free Enterprise Fund).

But practically, I have always been skeptical that the unitary executive theory is any more than a constitutional ideal rather than a practical, empirical fact. That is, it is somewhat of a legal fiction. The President of course cannot control every executive agent. And this is where Vermeule’s use of the administrative state as an instrument of CGC will falter. The political science and public choice literature is rife with theories of bureaucratic “drift,” under which agency members might “drift” from the statutory authorization giving them power. The same type of executive drift is possible from the perspective of the President; where preferences diverge between career staff and bureaucrats may have ideas of their own. After all, “…agencies (often have different goals than politicians or different judgments about how best to achieve those goals.” (see Jacob Gerson’s piece here). In the United States, for example, Jennifer Nou has written about civil servant disobedience, an increasingly prominent phenomenon during the Trump era. What is the Vermeulian plan for a disruptive civil service, with its own preferences, and its own agenda? In other words, do we think a strong bureaucracy will fall in line to CGC?

For example, one form of contestation might arise when a CGC President wants to promote “subsidiarity.” What incentive is there for a national administrative agency to embrace the principle of subsidiarity in the exercise of its legal functions? This seems to be a situation where there could be a classic preference divergence, where in the halls of power there is probably an incentive to arrogate more and more power to federal authorities over local authorities.

The upshot of Vermeulian CGC is that it would, I suspect, necessitate a mass amount of delegation to administrative agencies (though Vermeule does not expressly say this). Keeping in mind that Congress already has a difficult time in deciding how to monitor its delegations of power, and given that the pace and breadth of delegation seems to grow year over year, I have no faith that a CGC-based state would be able to control the mass delegation it plans. And it is worthwhile to question whether more delegation to administrative agencies is at all desirable.

These concepts are not new, and are fairly simple to understand. But they represent general rules about how the bureaucracy operates. There is no guarantee that a strong bureaucracy, as Vermeule wants it to be, will be a faithful agent for the President.

**

But let’s assume that such a unity of identity and purpose is achievable—the administrative state, under this understanding, could become a tool for CGC and its programs. But this illustrates the problem with administrative power, based on it is upon contested notions of expertise and the “science of administration”: these tools can be easily co-opted and turned against CGC. On this account, the administrative state could be a self-defeating enterprise for CGC.

It is interesting, at least to me, that Vermeule calls the administrative state a neutral “institutional technology.” This might be strictly true, but it harkens back to an era when we spoke of ideas of strictly neutral expertise, or of the administrative state’s neutral status as a collection of good-faith individuals working towards the public good. One of the notions inculcated by the administrative law functionalists of a previous generation (like Wilson, Landis, and Goodnow) was the idea that administrative technology should be kept independent from the travails of politics. On this account, the administrative state might be described as a neutral technology.

But as I have written before (and as Vermeule seems to tacitly acknowledge), there is nothing technological or neutral about the administrative state. As mentioned above, agents within the state may have their own goals. But more importantly, if delegation is the so-called “engine” of the administrative state, then the currency we are really speaking about in administrative law is power. Power is what administrative agents act on when they create rules and make decisions. Courts are primarily concerned with whether these rules and decisions fall within the scope of the enabling power, and/or whether the power exercised by delegated officials is justified. Power, then, is given by the legislature to the delegated actor, and it is that power we should be concerned with.

Vermeule accepts that this power can be used to advance religious goals, or perhaps goals centred around the constitutional aims of CGC. But it is just as likely that this power can be co-opted by bureaucrats, courts, or politicians or judges of a different stripe, to advance an exact opposite version of the “common good.” As I wrote before:

Progressives have spent more than a generation asking courts to stay out of the business of administration, especially because of their supposed conservative and market-based political philosophy. This largely worked. The administrative state is now entrenched in many common law countries. But administrative power knows no ideology. Its only ideology is power, in a raw sense. That power—being judicial, legislative, and executive power merged—can be wielded by those with anti-progressive goals, or more dangerously, by those with authoritarian tendencies who seek to “throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

The number of times this has happened in administrative law history are too many to count: but consider the use of administrative agencies by FDR to advance the New Deal, and then the capture of these agencies some 50 years later by President Reagan to advance his deregulatory agenda. Recall that Chevron deference was introduced during the Reagan era, and served to assist the Reagan administration’s environmental agenda. The administrative state’s allyship with power makes it a dangerous tool that can be used for partisan or political ends that CGCers would find abhorrent. 

This is not, in itself, a bad thing. In fact, it subjects the administrative state—to the extent permissible with preference divergence—to the democratic accountability of elected officials. But let’s not pretend that the administrative state can be a neutral technology that always and everywhere can be transformed to CGC ends.

**

If the administrative state is fundamentally about power, then we should be careful about its exercise. This is the traditional way we view power in constitutional law and administrative law. For example, judicial review in Canada is concerned with surveillance of lower decision-makers in order to ensure precise conformity to their enabling statutes (see Wall, at para 13; Vavilov, at paras 108-110). The same is true in the United States. CGC, then, turns the typical discussion of judicial review of administrative action on its head. Instead of discussing how best to control administrative decision-makers through doctrine, CGC seems to harken back to an old era of administrative law theory, where there is an implicit trust in administrative decision-makers to simply do the right thing. For the reasons I’ve noted above, it is unlikely that this will ever be the case. But as co-blogger Leonid Sirota points out, there is a downfall to assuming that power can simply be trusted to a massive administrative state, advancing the “common good” (whatever that turns out to be defined as):

From this recognition there should proceed, as I repeatedly insisted my post on the corrupting effects of power, to a further acknowledgement of the importance not just of moral but also of institutional and legal constraints on power. We must continue to work on what Jeremy Waldron describes as “Enlightenment constitutionalism” ― the project of structuring government so as to separate out and limit the power of those whom Professor Vermeule calls “the rulers” and empower citizens. This project recognizes the need for power but also its temptations and evils, and the fallibility of human beings in the face of these temptations and evils. As James Madison, in particular, reminds us, we should strive to so design our institutions as to make these human weaknesses work for us ― but we can only do so if we are acutely aware of them.

Much administrative law is best conceived in this light. We are talking, after all, about the law which governs administrators—the judicial and legal controls that we apply to ensure the legality of state power. The worry is even greater in administrative law contexts, because Parliament can easily escape the strictures of judicial control by delegating power away. Judicial review, on this front, is concerned with managing the risks associated with delegated power, and the discussion should be the best doctrine to effectuate that concern. But CGC seems to unleash the administrative state, putting trust in the bureaucracy to achieve its aims. This, to my mind, is a classic mistake.

**

Of course, I cannot address all of the implications of CGC in this (relatively) short post. I have tried to focus on a few implications for the world of administrative law. The metes and bounds of CGC will, hopefully, be fleshed out in further academic debate and discussion. For now, though, I am skeptical that the mass delegation of power that CGC will likely entail to the administrative state will be worth the risks associated with that delegation.

 

 

 

Offspring of Depravity

The origins of the administrative state, and why they matter

To a degree that is, I think, unusual among other areas of the law, administrative law in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada is riven by a conflict about its underlying institution. To be sure there, there are some constitutional lawyers who speak of getting rid of judicial review of legislation and so transferring the constitution to the realm of politics, rather than law, but that’s very much a minority view. Labour unions have their critics, but not so much among labour lawyers. But the administrative state is under attack from within the field of administrative law. It has, of course, its resolute defenders too, some of them going so far as to argue that the administrative state has somehow become a constitutional requirement.

In an interesting article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State” recently published in the Notre Dame Law Review, Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson challenge the defenders of the administrative state by pointing out its intellectual origins in what they persuasively argue was

a time, worldwide and in the United States, of truly awful ideas about government, about humanity, and about the fundamental unit of moral worth—ideas which, even in relatively benign forms, have institutional consequences that … should be fiercely resisted. (828)

That time was the 1930s.

Professors Calabresi and Lawson point out that the creation of the administrative state was spearheaded by thinkers ― first the original “progressives” and then New Dealers ― who “fundamentally did not believe that all men are created equal and should democratically govern themselves through representative institutions”. (829) At an extreme, this rejection of the belief in equality led them to embrace eugenics, whose popularity in the United States peaked in the 1930s. But the faith in expertise and “the modern descendants of Platonic philosopher kings, distinguished by their academic pedigrees rather than the metals in their souls” (829) is a less radical manifestation of the same tendency.

The experts, real or supposed ― some of whom “might well be bona fide experts [while] [o]thers might be partisan hacks, incompetent, entirely lacking in judgment beyond their narrow sphere of learning, or some combination thereof” (830n) ― would not “serve as wise counselors to autonomous individuals and elected representatives [but] as guardians for servile wards”. (830) According to the “advanced” thinkers of the 1930s, “[o]rdinary people simply could not handle the complexities of modern life, so they needed to be managed by their betters. All for the greater good, of course.” (834) Individual agency was, in any case, discounted: “the basic unit of value was a collective: the nation, the race, or the tribe. Individuals were simply cells in an organic whole rather than ends in themselves.” (834)

Professors Calabresi and Lawson are careful to stress that the point of their argument is not condemn the administrative state by association with the worst excesses of the times in which it originated. Rather, they want to push back against the trend, exemplified in articles such as Gillian Metzger’s “1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege“, of treating the foundation of the administrative state as deserving of particular deference or respect. They explain that

[b]ecause there is no authoritative constitutional text emanating from the 1930s, any reasons for treating that decade as interpretatively sacrosanct must focus on the moral goodness of the ideas that grounded that period. Many of the intellectual currents that dominated the 1930s were, frankly, very bad. As a starting point for thinking about human affairs, one’s first instinct should be to run as far away from that decade as quickly as one can. More fundamentally, the bad ideas of the 1930s that specifically drove the construction of certain parts of the modern administrative state—belief in omnipotent government by socially superior experts under broad subdelegations of legislative power, with a formal (or rote) separation of powers seen as an anachronistic hindrance to modern scientific management of people, who are not ends in themselves but simply means to the accomplishment of collective nationalist or tribalist ends—are at the intellectual core of just about everything bad that occurred during that decade. (839)

Professors Calabresi and Lawson conclude that, instead of looking to the 1930s as a source of public law we should ― even on purely moral grounds, in addition to fidelity to law ― we should look to the 1780s and the 1860s. The former decade was marked by “libertarian and egalitarian commitments to replace European feudalism with something new and better”, (842) as well as to separation of powers; the latter, by important progress in the implementation of those libertarian and egalitarian commitments, initially admittedly honoured in the breach in many ways. Professors Calabresi and Lawson also appeal to another historical point: the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, to which they trace what they call “the principle of legality, which says that executive and judicial actors can only act in accordance with preexisting law”. (863)

While I think it is a little, and perhaps more than a little, optimistic to connect this principle ― this formulation of the Rule of Law ― to the Magna Carta, it is supposed to be central to Canadian, and not only American, administrative law. As the Supreme Court said in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190, “[b]y virtue of the rule of law principle, all exercises of public authority must find their source in law.  All decision-making powers have legal limits”. [28] But the belief in the superiority of administrative power wielded by alleged experts for what is deemed, by them, to be the public good is very much a part of our administrative law too, and it goes back to the same roots as that of the American champions of the administrative state. As co-blogger Mark Mancini has argued here,

the reasons marshalled for why we defer to administrative agencies are the same today as they were in the 1940s. … For the most part, Canadian administrative law continues to be stuck in the thrall of American Progressivism—by which I mean [the] school of thought[] dominant in the New Deal era.

As Mark notes, “in Canada, we had our own band of administrative law Progressives” ― though of course they looked to the United States for inspiration. (There’s anything wrong with looking to the United States, of course; that’s what I’m doing here!) But then again, we had also had our own band of eugenicist progressives too, some of whom have statues on Parliament Hill. And we had our more peculiar rotten ideas about government too. The 1930s were a bad time ― arguably an especially bad time― in Canada, as well as in the United States and, for this reason, the argument made by Professors Calabresi and Lawson is relevant to Canadians.

Of course, the Canadian constitution is not the same is the American one. In particular, it does not incorporate as strong a conception of the separation of powers. Arguments to the effect that the administrative state in its current form is unconstitutional are much less straightforward in Canada; perhaps they are wrong. Certainly the case against the delegation of legislative power is more difficult to make under the Constitution Act, 1867, than under the U.S. Constitution. But all this means is that the moral case made by Professors Calabresi and Lawson is that much more significant. If the modern administrative state is the misbegotten offspring of an especially depraved epoch, then it should be dismantled, even if it is not unconstitutional. (The case for it being constitutionally required, however, is that much weaker ― not that it had much strength to begin with.)

And the advice to look to the 1780s or the 1860s is applicable to Canada too. Admittedly, the 1780s do not hold the same significance for our constitutional history as they do for our neighbours. But the ideas of what Jeremy Waldron calls “enlightenment constitutionalism”, which Professors Calabresi and Lawson associate with the 1780s, are relevant to Canada. Indeed, our own constitutional arrangements implement some of what, as I suggested in my critique of Professor Waldron’s arguments here, were the Enlightenment’s signal contributions to constitutional thought ― federalism and judicial review of legislation. As for the 1860s, sapienti sat.

As I noted at the outset, the moral worth of the administrative state is not just a matter for political philosophers to debate. It is an issue that is tied up with the ongoing fights about the details of administrative law doctrine. Perhaps this worth is unconnected to its sinister origins. But I think that it is for pro-administrativists to make this case. And I am quite skeptical that they can succeed. As have noted a number of times, most recently here, “[t]he administrative state is the state of prisons, of border control, of professional regulators determined to silence their members if not to impose official ideology on them”. It has come rather less far from its smug, authoritarian beginnings than its defenders would have us believe.

The Empire is Still Strong: A Response to Prof. Daly

Over on Administrative Law Matters, Prof. Daly writes that “[a]nti-administrativists have not had a good couple of weeks.” So his argument goes, in the last number of years “the administrative state in the United States has been under sustained attack, traduced as illegitimate and a betrayal of the commitment of the Founding Fathers.” This “cartoonish version of modern public administration” with “quavering judges unable or unwilling to get in its way” apparently met three defeats in three separate cases at the United States Supreme Court this spring: (1) Gundy, a non-delegation challenge, which I wrote about here (2) Kisor, a challenge involving the doctrine of deference which applies when administrators interpret their own regulations and (3) Dept of Commerce v New York, the census case, in which so-called “hard look review” was deployed by the Court. To Prof Daly, each of these cases represents the victory of well-developed administrative law principles over broad-side constitutional challenges to the administrative state. In this sense, “anti-administrativists” indeed had a bad few weeks.

I view the matter quite differently. Each of these cases actually shows how the “anti-administrativist” position has gained some traction, such that administrative state sympathizers like Justice Kagan must respond and incorporate them. In different ways, each case represents at least a partial triumph for positions and tools of administrative law that have roots in what Prof Daly calls the “anti-administrstivist” position.

Before moving to the cases, a note first about terminology. The term “anti-administrativist” implies that there is some objection to administrators writ large. But virtually no one makes this argument—not even Gorsuch J, who in Gundy did not criticize the very act of delegation to administrators itself, only the practice of legislative delegation. Much administrative law criticism sounds in bringing doctrine into a more coherent state, with a greater tie to fundamental constitutional arrangements. Jeff Pojanowski’s article, Neo-Classical Administrative Law, is a good example of this sort of argument. Accordingly, I will not use the term “anti-administrativist,” because it catches too much criticism: criticism that is not necessarily opposed to administrators making decisions, but that is instead focused on rooting those decisions in legislative authorization or other constitutional norms.

In terms of the cases cited by Prof Daly to support his argument, consider first Gundy. There, Justice Kagan interpreted the statute at issue to avoid a non-delegation problem, noting that delegation problems are in reality problems of statutory interpretation. To be sure, this was not a success for those who believe in a strong-form version of the non-delegation doctrine. Some of Kagan J’s opinion reads as a paean to administrative law functionalism, speaking for example to the modern “necessities of government” and concluding that if the statute at issue was unconstitutional, “then most of Government is unconstitutional.” But at the same time, the actual conclusions in Kagan J’s opinion are not at all monolithic. Rather than simply stating that the delegation passed muster under the easy-to-satisfy “intelligible principle” test, she took pains to qualify the delegation according to the text, context, and purpose of the statute. This had the effect of narrowing the delegation to avoid the sort of broad non-delegation problem that Gorsuch J saw in the case.

What motivates this sort of reasoning? It is very similar to the adoption of a clear statement rule, used variously as substantive canons of statutory interpretation in the United States. Clear statement rules work like this: absent a clear statement in the legislation, courts will not presume a certain result. Usually that certain result is contrary to some constitutional norm or value, even though the result is not an in-law constitutional violation. As William Eskridge explains, the Court has variously deployed this sort of reasoning in the context of delegation problems, “refer[rring] to the non-delegation idea as a canon of statutory interpretation rather than an enforceable constitutional doctrine.” Why? Because the US Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress, and statutes (laws) cannot be made without bicameralism and presentment. This was the approach adopted in the Benzene Case, for example, where the Court interpreted a delegation to OSHA to create a “safe and healthful workplace.” The Court interpreted the statute to prevent the broad delegation, imposing a requirement of cost-benefit analysis on the agency.

Kagan J’s opinion is basically the same. She qualified the delegation with reference to the broader statutory scheme. She would only do this to avoid some delegation problem that engages a core constitutional presumption against delegation, as Eskridge points out. The result was an interpretation of the statute that avoids constitutional problems that many of us who oppose widespread delegation would find problematic. In this sense, constitutional objections to widespread delegation found their way into Kagan J’s opinion.

Consider next Kisor, the regulatory deference case. Kisor reformulated so-called Auer deference to administrative interpretation of regulations, which simply held that a court would only interfere with such an interpretation if it was “plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” But Kagan J, in a majority opinion, came to a very different view of the conditions for the engagement of now-renamed “Kisor deference.” This opinion had the effect of cabining deference such that it only applied when the underlying justifications for it—legal and epistemic—were truly present. Consider each of the steps of Kisor deference, as explained by Chris Walker and excerpted by Professor Daly:

  1. The regulatory provision must be “genuinely ambiguous” after applying all of the traditional tools of interpretation (Chevron step one).
  2. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must be “reasonable,” and “[t]hat is a requirement an agency can fail” (Chevron step two).
  3. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must be the agency’s “authoritative” or “official position,” which means it must “at the least emanate from [the agency head or equivalent final policymaking] actors, using those vehicles, understood to make authoritative policy in the relevant context” (some version of the Mead doctrine/Chevron step zero).
  4. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must implicate the agency’s substantive expertise (some version of Skidmore deference).
  5. The agency’s regulatory interpretation must reflect “fair and considered judgment” — not an ad hoc litigating position or otherwise an interpretation that causes regulated entities unfair surprise (existing Christopher exception to Auer deference).

Each of these steps reflect varying justifications for deference that must actually be present before deference follows:

(1)-(2): Genuine ambiguity engages the presumption that if the legislature spoke clearly to a matter, its view must prevail over contrary interpretations by an agency. This is related to fundamental constitutional ideals of congressional/legislative superiority over a mere delegated body.

(3) and (5): Authoritativeness and fair and considered judgment reflects the requirement that agencies must adequately explain their conclusions, so that courts can conduct the constitutional act of judicial review, and so that the public can understand their conclusions. Both of these conditions are important for the public acceptance and legality of the administrative state, as noted in the Commerce Department case discussed below.

(4) Truly-existing expertise is an epistemic reason for deference, as Prof. Daly points out in his book, A Theory of Deference in Administrative Law. While it may not be a legal reason for deference (and hence not a very persuasive reason for it), it at least shows that Kagan J was concerned with ensuring that deference should apply when the reasons for its justifications are present.

So, Kisor is actually a representation of a much more constitutionally-justifiable doctrine of deference that is consistent with critiques of the administrative state as untethered to and uncontrolled by constitutional norms. Kisor is driven by a need to cabin deference to the situations where it is most justifiable, especially with reference to constitutional norms that require congressional text to govern and judicial review to be available and effective. This is in direct contrast to the Supreme Court of Canada’s unprincipled, automatic doctrine of deference.

Finally, consider the Commerce Dept case concerning a citizenship question on the census. The problem here was the Government’s explanation for why it wanted such a question. As Chief Justice Roberts explained:

We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process…[W]e cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given. The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law, after all, is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public. Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.

This formulation of the requirement of so-called “hard-look” review frames the problem as one of public justification so that courts can scrutinize administrative action, as a corollary to the Rule of Law. To Professor Daly, this means that the “anti-administrativists’ caricature of fawning judicial servility to technocratic masters” is incorrect. But it is useful to note that the tools used to restrain judges pointed to by Professor Daly developed because of important critiques of the administrative state. Hard look review developed because of a broad trend towards pluralism, as explained by Martin Shapiro. This pluralism, which supported broader standing rules to challenge administrative action, also supported the creation of a new ground of review to ensure the adequacy of judicial review and the public justification of administrative actions. This trend was decidedly skeptical of administrative power, on the theory that agencies were “captured” by regulated parties. Far from being a welcome tool of administrative law, hard look review was and remains deeply contested. Those who might consider themselves Wilsonian progressives would balk at hard look review, even on procedure, because it means that courts are readily interfering in the policy and discretionary judgments of so-called “experts.” This says nothing of hard look review on substance. But administrative skepticism, and the requirement of public justification, cuts hard the other way in hard look review—which also means, like liberal standing rules, that agencies must be ready to defend its action before the courts and in the public eye (the APA is broadly representative of this trend).

For these reasons, each of the cases identified by Prof. Daly are not rejections of administrative skepticism. Rather, they are incorporations of a certain idea of administrative law as a control over the fiat of administrators. In this sense, reflexive deference and delegation met strong judicial rules and attitudes about controlling the administrative state. This might not amount to “anti-administrativism” but it means that the administrative critique is not without its judicial defenders. Professor Daly and I get to the same place; there are tools of administrative law available to control administrators. It just depends on whether judges use them, and from where they come.

All or Nothing At All?: Restricting the Growth of the Administrative State

Non-delegation limits do not spell the end of administrative government.

The Supreme Court of United States (SCOTUS), in the recent Gundy decision, once again rejected a challenge to a delegation of legislative power based on the so-called non-delegation doctrine. The non-delegation doctrine, in theory, holds that all legislative power rests in Congress, and so by necessary implication, Congress cannot delegate that power away to agencies without an “intelligible principle” to guide the delegation. In practice, the SCOTUS has only ever sustained a non-delegation challenge in a handful of cases in the New Deal era, instead endorsing wide delegations of authority to any number of administrative bodies for over 70 years. One might say that the Court’s reluctance to invoke the non-delegation doctrine is due to the important fuel that delegation provides to the administrative state. Indeed, one might argue that such widespread delegation is necessary for the project of “modern governance.”

But this is not necessarily true. Much of the discussion of limitations on the administrative state speaks in large generalities, and Gundy is no exception. The spectre of the destruction of the modern government that Americans (and Canadians) have come to know is always invoked by those who seek to preserve its power. But, if the non-delegation doctrine is constitutionally justifiable, its invocation in any of its instantiations will not end up destroying modern government. This is because non-delegation limits do not speak in absolute prohibitions, but rather limits in degree and emphasis; shifting the onus back to Congress to legislate within the confines of the Constitution. Canadians should take note and remain wary of arguments advanced by those who reject constitutional limits on administrative power based on functional scares.

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Gundy involved a delegation of power from Congress to the Attorney General, under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). Under SORNA, it is up to the Attorney General to decide whether the statute’s requirements for registration of sex offenders convicted before the enactment of the statute apply.

Nonetheless, based on existing doctrine, Kagan J for the plurality said that the delegation in SORNA “easily passed constitutional muster.” This is because, to Kagan J, the SCOTUS in a previous case had already cabined the Attorney General’s discretion in this regard by requiring that SORNA apply to all pre-Act offenders “as soon as feasible.” Taken in light of the context, text, and purpose of the statute, the Court found that the delegating language was sufficiently cabined in order to provide an intelligible principle, because the Attorney General’s discretion is limited to deciding when it is feasible to apply the statute. The Court, then, interpreted the statute to avoid the non-delegation problem, as it had done years previously in the Benzene Case.

This conclusion appeared driven not only by the law, but by the consequences of permitting a non-delegation challenge to succeed. Kagan J frighteningly noted that “…if SORNA’s delegation is unconstitutional, then most of Government is unconstitutional—dependent as Congress is on the need to give discretion to executive officials to implement its programs.” Alito J concurred in the result, but noted that should a majority of the Court wish to revisit the non-delegation doctrine, he would.

Justice Gorsuch penned an important dissent. In it, he criticized the plurality’s apparent waving-away of the delegation problem. In the litigation, the Department of Justice did not concede that the Attorney General was required to apply the statute to pre-Act offenders “as soon as feasible.” More to the point, the Attorney General has wide discretion to select the offenders, if any, that should be subject to the statute. For Gorsuch J, “[t]hese unbounded policy choices have profound consequences for the people they affect,” including criminal defendants. In light of Gorsuch J’s problem with the SORNA delegation, he proposed a new test. That test would permit Congress to delegate the power to “fill up the details” of a statute—so delegation would not be prohibited outright. And, the delegation of power may make the “application of that rule depend on executive fact-finding.” But for Gorsuch J, the intelligible principle doctrine “has no basis in the original meaning of the Constitution, [or] in history” and should be replaced by a basic requirement that Congress make the necessary policy judgments.

In response to the problem that some have raised that Gorsuch J’s test would spell doom for the administrative state, he responded as such:

The separation of powers does not prohibit any particular policy outcome, let alone dictate any conclusion about the proper size and scope of government. Instead, it is a procedural guarantee that requires Congress to assemble a social consensus before choosing our nation’s course on policy questions….Congress is hardly bereft of options to accomplish all it might wish to achieve.

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I think Gundy contains within it a number of important implications for the delegation of legislative power that apply in both Canada and the United States. The first question is whether it is really true, as Kagan J notes, that non-delegation would render most of government unconstitutional; the second is the sort of limits that one could envision applying to delegations of power.

The Kagan J criticism is a classic functionalist proposition. So the argument goes, if the Court enforces a non-delegation norm of any sort, it would interfere with the practical ability of agencies to implement their enabling statutes, hobbling modern government. And to some observers, it wouldn’t take a full-fledged non-delegation doctrine: even some limitations on administrative government could have “pernicious consequences.” But this strikes me as a vast overstatement, and a self-defeating one at that. First, if Kagan J is right that most of government constitutes a delegation problem as the Constitution is interpreted, what does that say about modern government? It says that government as constituted is a sprawling beast that has far outpaced the Constitution. Some might respond: who cares? But for anyone who cares about the Rule of Law, and government by law, the Constitution reigns supreme over the fiat of administrators. And if one is a legal formalist—as I am—then the arrangement of an extra- constitutional government is itself a problem for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons.

But I do not think what Kagan J says is true, on the facts of Gundy or generally. First, Gundy involved a very particular type of delegation: the power to essentially decide how a statute applies, if at all. Some might say that these sorts of delegations exist all over the map, and they may be right. But one can draw a meaningful distinction between delegations that are meant to “fill in the details” of a statute, even in a legislative sense, and delegations designed to give power to an administrator to decide how, when, and to whom a statute applies, as in SORNA. Gymnastics around “feasibility” aside, SORNA delegates wide power for the Attorney General to decide the scope of application of a statute. This allows him to make law outside of the requirements of bicameralism and presentment. And for instrumentalist reasons, this is a problem: the Rule of Law requires predictability, and why should those deserving the presumption of innocence be subject to the whims of a chief prosecutor as to whether their conduct violates the law?

Now consider the consequences if a non-delegation limit is imposed on Congress. This would not render most of government unconstitutional, nor would it have “pernicious consequences.” Such arguments mistake the mere existence of a limitation for its extent. No one—not even Gorsuch J—is suggesting that delegation itself is unconstitutional. Such a finding would, indeed, render unconstitutional administrative government. But limiting delegation to simply require Congress to speak in more detail would only minimally increase the transaction costs of legislating while paying much more ex post in terms of predictability and consistency with the Constitution. It is unclear to me why the proponents of the administrative state fight even this requirement.

And this flows into the second question. Assuming the non-delegation doctrine is constitutionally justifiable, there are any number of limits that could be imposed on delegations, each of which would not hobble the ability of government to delegate. Courts could require Congress to speak using a clear-statement rule when it chooses to delegate legislative power. This would be on the theory that the delegation of power has the risk to be extra-constitutional, and should be treated with caution from a Rule of Law perspective. The SCOTUS already accepted this sort of requirement in the Benzene Case, when it interpreted the statute at issue to avoid the delegation problem in absence of any clear statement in the legislation. While clear statement rules of this sort could be attacked from the perspective that they allow courts to put their fingers on the scale in favour of certain interpretive outcomes, one might respond that the preferred outcome in this case is one protected by the Constitution in the form of a limit or restriction on delegation. It is apparent that requiring Congress to use a clear statement would likely do nothing to stop modern government.

Courts could also simply enforce the intelligible principle doctrine on its own terms. That is, courts should simply ask whether there is a “principle” that is “intelligible.” Intelligibility would impose some requirement on courts to actually interrogate the policy aims of a delegation to determine its internal consistency, and perhaps question whether it actually provides guidance to executive officials. A principle that is unintelligible will not provide guidance. One could meaningfully question whether courts have actually applied the existing doctrinal instantiation of the non-delegation doctrine on its own terms.

Finally, non-delegation limits might be imposed by the elected branches: this was the approach that was seemingly advocated by then Professor Antonin Scalia in a paper he wrote after the Benzene Case: (the questions raised by delegation “…are much more appropriate for a representative assembly than for a hermetically sealed committee of nine lawyers”). Congress could simply start to speak clearly. The incentive for Congress to do this might be political. As I have noted elsewhere, the delegation of power can be wielded in either direction. Gundy provides a great example. The delegation of power to the Attorney General to decide when, how, and to whom a law applies is a great deal of power. Right-wing legislators might predict that, when they are not in power, such a power might be used against political causes they support. In the US, Democrats are already seeing how powers can be abused by the Attorney General. Of course, the power of the executive can filter through executive agencies, as well. If Congress itself recognizes the ability for delegated power to be used for ends with which it may not be sympathetic, it may have an incentive to limit and control delegation within constitutional limits.

None of these limitations spell the end of administrative governance. Far from it. I fear that the death knell of administrative government is a rhetorical tool used by administrative law functionalists who wish to preserve the power of the administrative state. But as Gundy shows, the powers conferred on executives by Congress can be vast—and the delegation of vast power can be abused, contrary to constitutional limits. All actors in the system have the ability and the responsibility to prevent that abuse, as a corollary to the Rule of Law.

The upshot of all of this is that the administrative state is likely here to stay, but it does not have to remain in its current form to be successful or useful. It can move towards consistency with the Constitution at a small marginal cost to its supposed efficiency and effectiveness.