• Video

What Is Administrative Law?

What kind of legal authority do federal executive branch agencies have? Professor Susan Dudley gives an overview of the field of Administrative Law, which deals with this question. Administrative Law studies how executive branch agencies interpret, and administer, and enforce, legislation that has been delegated to them from Congress. She discusses some of the responsibilities these agencies have in practice. https://youtube.com/watch?v=sXpp3igzNWI

Transcript

Administrative law is the study of how executive branch agencies interpret, and administer, and enforce, legislation that has been delegated to them from the legislature, the legislative branch. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, operates under numerous statutes. The Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; a separate Safe Drinking Water Act; Superfund, which deals with abandoned hazardous waste sites. Agencies have their authority to issue regulations from statutes that Congress has passed. And so using that authority, they will issue proposed, and then final, regulations that actually have the force of law. Agencies implement the policies through issuing the regulations, and then enforcing those regulations. Many agencies will have a staff that's responsible for enforcement. And that can vary, how that works, across agencies. There are a lot of administrative agencies issuing regulations across a broad number of things. So you'd have the Environmental Protection Agency, whose purpose is to protect public health and the environment; the Consumer Product Safety Commission, concerned about consumer products; the Federal Trade Commission, ensuring fair trade across the country; the Securities and Exchange Commission, worried about securities and stock market transactions. So they really run the gamut of things that they do.

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