Academics Areas of Study

Administrative Law

Explore this section

Administrative agencies make policy choices that affect virtually every aspect of American life—the quality of our air and water, the level of immigration deportations, the safety of our automobiles, the openness of the internet, the stability of our financial system, and, at least implicitly, often the prices we pay for goods and services.

The Cornell Law School faculty’s approach to administrative law focuses on legal doctrine as enriched with social, political, historical, and social scientific considerations.

Administrative law is the body of law that governs how administrative agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Communications Commission, exercise discretion over these wide-ranging policy areas. This body of law emerged largely over the last century in response to acute fears of a growing and unelected administrative state and it attends to a rich set of constitutional, statutory, and common law considerations.

The Cornell Law School faculty’s approach to administrative law focuses on legal doctrine as enriched with social, political, historical, and social scientific considerations. The faculty offers both general administrative law courses and a variety of specialized courses, including in clinical programs that often work on cases touching on administrative law issues.

An introduction to the constitutional and other legal issues posed by the modern administrative state. Topics include: procedural due process, separation of powers, procedural modes of administrative policymaking; judicial review of agency action; and the oversight and control relationships between agencies and Congress or the President. The course provides a working familiarity with the fundamentals of administrative procedure, as well as a larger inquiry into the role of agencies in our constitutional system—and the effect of legal doctrine on shaping that role.
We live in a democracy yet bureaucrats, not elected representatives, produce many of the rules that govern our economic and social behavior. This course examines the regulatory process by addressing the politics, ethics, and economics of the modern administrative state. When is regulatory intervention into markets socially beneficial? How should we value a human life for the purposes of regulatory cost benefit analysis? How does politics influence regulatory production? The course gives attention to connections with administrative law doctrines. Students will write a paper and give a short presentation to the class.