Institutional Design by Default

The central concern of administrative law is how to control agency discretion. Agencies are handed enormous authority, and administrative law consists primarily – indeed, almost exclusively – of a set of doctrines designed to inform, curb, or enable other actors to oversee discretionary agency actions. Administrative law is preoccupied with establishing procedures to prevent agency abuse and designing oversight by non-agency players – the President, Congress, private stakeholders, and, most obviously, the judiciary. All the core doctrines of administrative law are generally understood as implementing basic decisions regarding institutional choice: who does what? How should power be divided up amongst these institutions