William Boyd (UCLA School of Law) has posted Fact-making and Epistemic Virtue in the Administrative State (Building Democratic Capacity: Essays on Administrative Law’s Futures, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter highlights the vital importance of government fact-making for the project of reimagining administrative law. It begins with Max Weber’s observation that bureaucracy depends fundamentally on knowledge production, and canvasses some of the most important examples of government fact-making, including especially regulatory science. The chapter then emphasizes three aspects of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to undermine government fact-making: deconstruction, politicization, and epistemic capture, showing how these efforts have been framed in the language of epistemic virtue and hyper-ethics as part of a longer-term strategy to direct attention to the virtues of government knowledge practices rather than the underlying problems. The chapter concludes with some proposals for structural reform as well as a discussion of how the ongoing assault on government fact-making undermines not only our ability to see and understand particular problems but also the capacity for new publics to take shape in the first place.
Recommended!
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