Leviathan's Apologists

Professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule of the Harvard Law School are perhaps today’s two most distinguished defenders of the modern administrative state. They are not wooly-eyed thinkers who pretend that the administrative state is perfect in all of its particulars. As their book title suggests, however, they do believe the current rules do an adequate job of using law to restrain Hobbes’s Leviathan, primarily by reconciling two imperatives: maintaining sufficient flexibility to allow administrative agencies to discharge their delegated functions in the modern, post-New Deal state, and simultaneously offering sufficient protections for individual rights and privileges against serious government abuse.