Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 154 of Richard Epstein’s 2020 book, The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law:

Defenders of modern administrative law do not look at matters from the perspective of the regulated party. Rather, their basic claim is that administrative agencies need the ability to adapt to changed circumstances, and it is said that by doing so, reversals of their own previous rules will be enabled, even in the face of what could be an interim authoritative judicial interpretation of the same materials. The system thus protects the discretion of administrators but only at the cost of increasing the risk necessarily placed on the private parties governed by these rules. It is hard to find any reason that an agency, with its greater knowledge of the regulatory, administrative, and policymaking process, should be allowed to fob this risk off onto private parties, given these parties’ lesser knowledge about agency activities.