What is meant by enabling legislation regarding an adminstrative agency?

Answer 1

Enterpreting agency enabling acts: misplaced metaphors in administrative law.



by Lars Noah


INTRODUCTION

Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.

Benjamin N. Cardozo(1)

The rapid growth of the administrative state represents one of the most significant, and some would add alarming, political developments of the twentieth century. Federal regulatory agencies have proliferated, first as a centerpiece of the New Deal and then again during the 1960s, and their powers have expanded as well. Initially greeted with some suspicion, few today question their legitimacy or centrality as legal institutions.(2) More so than do the courts, federal agencies exercise pervasive control over economic and other activities in this country. Whatever their failings and accompanying calls for reform or more sweeping deregulation, these entities inevitably will continue to do the work of government.

Although many scholars have emphasized procedural rights and opportunities for judicial review as mechanisms for supervising and legitimizing agency actions, the initial delegation of authority from Congress must remain as the focal point for any such effort. Recently, however, it seems that enabling statutes have received insufficient attention as imposing limits on agency power. Once regarded as akin to corporate charters, some commentators now regard these delegations more fluidly, analogizing an agency's organic act either to a constitution or to an even looser source of authority to fashion common law on a subject.

Actually, Professor James Landis captured this pragmatic spirit more than sixty years ago when he defended the growing reliance on administrative agencies during the New Deal:


One of the ablest administrators that it was my good fortune to know, I believe, never read, at least more than casually, the statutes that he translated into reality. He assumed that they gave him power to deal with the broad problems of an industry and, upon that understanding, he sought his own solutions. Limitations upon his powers that counsel brought to his attention, naturally, he respected; but there is an enormous difference between the legalistic form of approach that from the negative vantage of statutory limitations looks to see what it must do, and the approach that considers a problem from the standpoint of finding out what it can do.(3)

Read the rest at below website.