Administrative law in the political system

Administrative Law in the Political System, third edition, represents an attempt to satisfy a need in the public administration field for a comprehensive administrative law text written by a social scientist especially for social science students. The gen eral purpose of the book is to convey to students the role of administrative law in the American political system, but, more specifically, its role in shaping, guiding, and re stricting the actions of administrative agencies to make regulatory practices more in line with due process standards. The book is unique in that all traditional adminis trative law topics covered (e.g., rule-making, order-making, judicial review of agency actions) are written in non-technical language, with emphasis placed on points of par ticular interest to social science students. Even a Glossary is provided in the Ap pendix to assist students who may not be familiar with certain legal terms. Special at tention is given to the impact politics has on efforts by administrators to comply with administrative law dictates. Systems theory is employed to introduce the various "po litical actors" in the unique environments to the regulatory agencies and to stress that agency regulators must respond not only to the "demands" placed upon them by ad ministrative law, but to the conflicting socio-economic, political pressures stemming from their total environment. Starting with Chapter 3, a relevant administrative law case is presented at the end of each chapter, with comments and questions, to give students an idea of how specific administrative law principles and doctrines are ap plied by the courts to resolve legal disputes. A case study of the regulatory efforts of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is presented in the final chapter to demonstrate how previously examined administrative principles apply in the real world and how the "politics of regulation" inevitably forces our administrators in practice to com promise administrative law ideals.

An enormous effort has been made to make this third edition as up-to-date as possible. Emphasis has been placed on current trends in administrative law, recent court decisions, happenings during the Clinton Administration, and, especially, the impact the era of "re-inventing government" and neo-conservatism has had on the development of administrative law.

This book should be appreciated by social science students, particularly in the area of public administration, because it: (1) is the most comprehensive administra tive law text written by a social scientist especially for social science students; (2) does not assume prior legal training or command of a technical legal vocabulary: (3) draws upon both the legal and social science literature to help provide insights into the na ture of administrative law; (4) plays down the case approach, commonly employed in law school contexts, in favor of a more direct descriptive and analytical approach, which makes the relatively difficult subject matter of administrative law considerably casier to understand: (5) employs systems analysis, a popular analytical framework familiar to most relatively advanced social science students, to place administrative law in the perspective of the American political system; (6) relates administrative law to topics of particular concern to social science students (e.g., the politics of drafting and implementing regulatory policies); and (7) is quite current, thus placing admin istrative law developments in the perspective of the 1990s.