Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 489 of Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s brilliant 2014 book – whose title poses a question to which the book’s text gives the answer “yes” – Is Administrative Law Unlawful?:

Indeed, administrative governance is a sort of power that has long been understood to lack legal obligation. It is difficult to understand how laws made without representation, and adjudications made without independent judges and juries, have the obligation of law; instead, they apparently rest merely on government coercion. They therefore cannot be perpetuated on a theory of consent or acquiescence, and they traditionally would have had the potential to justify revolution. Certainly, when the English Crown justified its power as constitutional, the English and eventually the Americans engaged in revolutions against it.