Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/jamisoncolburn Recent documents in Jamison E. Colburn en-us Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:15:46 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/jamisoncolburn/15 http://works.bepress.com/jamisoncolburn/15 Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:33:27 PDT What does it mean to say that an administrative agency is a 'source' of law? Agencies constantly generate what our society regards as law, making and remaking legal obligations at a frenetic pace. Yet most of the rules agencies make lack the force of law and recognizing those that have it is often an exceptionally complicated task. It is a task, in fact, that courts are usually not suited to performing, at least not very well. In this article, I argue that the nature of modern legislation and our turn toward informal agency process have combined to render the bulk of lawmaking in our society unrecognizable within our conventional picture of legality. If legal rules are, as most positivists maintain, simply "exclusionary reasons" by which legal actors guide their conduct, agency rules that are never enacted as such are becoming more and more of our law's content. Informal processes like notice and comment were neither the beginning nor the culmination of our legal system's departure from traditional, standardized forms of law. But they may be the best evidence of a quite plastic concept of law ascendant today. Jamison E. Colburn Administrative Law Constitutional Law Jurisprudence