The Volokh Conspiracy

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"Our Founders Understood That Men Are Not Angels, and We Disregard That Insight at Our Peril When …"

"we allow the few (or the one) to aggrandize their power based on loose or uncertain authority."

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


A nicely crafted passage from Justice Gorsuch's concurrence defending of the "major questions doctrine" (the principle that "ambiguous language" in a statute shouldn't be seen as delegating "highly consequential power" to the Executive Branch, even if it can be read as delegating lesser power) in today's tariffs case. And here are the two following sentences:

We delude ourselves, too, if we think that power will accumulate safely and only in the hands of dispassionate "people … found in agencies." Even if unelected agency officials were uniquely immune to the desire for more power (an unserious assumption), they report to elected Presidents who can claim no such modesty.

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution. He is also the co-host of the Free Speech Unmuted podcast.