ABA Honors Professor Jerry Mashaw, Alumnus Kevin Stack ’97 with Administrative Law Award

Professors Jerry L. Mashaw and Kevin M. Stack ’97 have been jointly chosen for the American Bar Association’s 2013 Annual Scholarship Award for best published work in administrative law.

The ABA Annual Scholarship Committee selected Mashaw in recognition of his book, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (Yale University Press 2012) and Stack for his article,  Interpreting Regulations, 111 Mich. L. Rev. 355 (2012).

This is the third time that the ABA’s Administrative Law Section has recognized Professor Mashaw, placing him in a tie for the most such recognitions since the inception of the section’s scholarship award in 1986. The award is the first recognition in this category for Professor Stack. The formal presentations of the award will take place at a luncheon in November in Washington, D.C.

Mashaw is a Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School who teaches courses on administrative law, social welfare policy, regulation, legislation, and the design of public institutions. Stack is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School. He writes on administrative law, regulation, separation of powers, presidential powers, European Union administrative law, and the theoretical foundations of public law.

Professor Mashaw’s book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. He examines how Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority.

Ron Krotoszynski Jr., the Vice-Chair of the ABA’s Annual Scholarship Award Committee, called Creating the Administrative Constitution, “an important work that challenges our settled understanding of how the federal administrative state came into being.”

“The project is remarkable for its scope, ambition, and excellence,” said Krotoszynski.

Remarking on Professor Stack’s article, Krotoszynski said the ambitious work “casts an important new light on critically important issues associated with interpretation of regulations and proposes a creative solution to making agency interpretation of regulations less arbitrary.”

Prior to coming to Yale Law School, Professor Mashaw taught at Tulane University and the University of Virginia. His books include Administrative Law: Introduction to the American Public Law System (with Richard Merrill and Peter Shane), Bureaucratic Justice (1983) (awarded Harvard University’s Gerard Henderson Memorial Prize in 1993), The Struggle for Auto Safety (with David Harfst), (awarded the Sixth Annual Scholarship Prize of the ABA’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy in 1992), and Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law (awarded the Section’s Twelfth Annual Scholarship Prize in 1998 and the Order of the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 2002). Professor Mashaw is also a founding member and past president of the National Academy of Social Insurance and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Stack joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2007 after teaching at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He currently serves as the co-chair of the Separation of Powers Committee for the Administrative and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association. He is also co-author (with Lisa Bressman and Ed Rubin) of The Regulatory State (Aspen Publishers, 2013), a casebook on statutes and administrative lawmaking. During his time at Yale Law School, Stack served as senior editor at The Yale Law Journal and as articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.