… is from page 26 of Philip Hamburger’s learned, timely, and important 2014 book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (footnote deleted):
The relevance of absolute power for administrative law became more clear when one realizes that Anglo-American law has a history of an extra- and supralegal power in what what known as the “prerogative.” This was the name of the power claimed by the English kings, and it corresponds to the administrative power claimed by the president or under his authority.
U.S. presidents today, with the complicity of the courts and through the cowardice of Congress, routinely issue diktats of the sort that rightly stoked the anger and fear of the great Anglo-American constitutionalists such as Sir Edward Coke and the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
