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Legitimacy, Flexibility And Administrative Law, Soochan Ahn

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reassesses the importance of flexibility in ensuring the legitimacy of the administrative state and argues how administrative law should accommodate the ever-growing agency discretion without sacrificing the legitimacy of the agencies. Flexibility results from an agency’s exercise of its interpretative power with statutory ambiguities and is the most significant ingredient of the modern administrative state. However, flexibility does not mean anything goes. There should be limits. The proper latitude of judicial review is the essential device that makes the administrative state legitimate. From the perspective of a traditional approach of U.S. administrative law, giving agencies flexibility evokes the …