Preface

• Author: James W. Conrad, Jr.
• Pages: vii-x

vii

When the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative

Law and Regulatory Practice approved the rst B S-

  F A L in late 2001, it declared its

“aim[] to [be to] summarize in manageable length and format the basic

propositions of current federal administrative law.”1 In an early exam-

ple of what has subsequently come to be known as crowd-sourcing, the

Section enlisted a broad corps of the leading lights in the eld to pro-

duce a document whose strength, then-Section Chair Ron Levin noted

in his preface, lies in the way it “encapsulates the collective views of a

wide segment of administrative lawyers and scholars.”2 As a result, the

document’s reporters found “irresistible”—as do I—the temptation to

hope that others would “nd the document worthy of something akin

to Skidmore deference . . . due to ‘the thoroughness evident in its con-

sideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and

later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to per-

suade, if lacking power to control.’”3 In retrospect, it is safe to say that

this condence was warranted, as evidenced by the dozens of times the

document has been cited in the scholarly literature and, more generally,

by the respect with which it is held by experts in the eld.

The feasibility of this project arose from what the reporters

described as the “constitution[al]” quality of the Administrative Proce-

dure Act [APA]—i.e., its centrality and imperviousness to amendment.4

“At the same time,” the reporters noted, the “requirements of admin-

istrative law extend far beyond that document, to include the judicial

gloss on the APA, other decisions that seem pure examples of fed-

eral common law, the Constitution, several other generally applicable

1. 54 Admin. L. Rev. 1, 6 (2002).

2. Id. at 2 (emphasis in original).

3. Id. at 7-8 (quoting Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134 (1944)). The chief reporter

was Paul Verkuil, assisted by Michael Herz and John Duffy.

4. Id. at 7.

PR EFAC E

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