DAVID BERNSTEIN REVIEWS PHILIP HAMBURGER’S BOOK, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes.

Most scholars believe that administrative law began with the rise of administrative agencies in the late nineteenth century. Hamburger, by contrast, suggests that administrative law — by which he means legally binding rules that are developed through unilateral actions by the executive branch — has existed since colonial times and beyond, and that claims of administrative autonomy are direct descendants of the claims of the English monarchy to executive omnipotence. The Framers of the Constitution were well aware of such claims, and utterly rejected them. Yet, Hamburger argues, modern administrative law embodies precisely the evils that the Constitution and its separation of powers sought to prevent.

That seems to be the case.