Law Commons^™

The Permit Power Revisited, J.B. Ruhl, Eric Biber

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Two decades ago, Professor Richard Epstein fired a shot at the administrative state that has gone largely unanswered in legal scholarship. His target was the permit power, under which legislatures prohibit a specified activity by statute and delegate administrative agencies discretionary power to authorize the activity under terms the agency mandates in a regulatory permit. Describing the permit power, accurately, as an enormous power in the state, Epstein bemoaned that it had received scant attention in the academic literature. He sought to fill that gap. Centered on his premise that the permit power represents a complete inversion of the proper …