Professor Mashaw Visits Australia, New Zealand to Present on Recent Work

Jerry Mashaw, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law, recently returned from a two-month trip visiting Universities throughout Australia and New Zealand to discuss his work.

The trip began with an invitation from Australian National University where he received the title of Distinguished Visiting Professor. Once that visit was established, invitations began to arrive from other institutions and Mashaw extended his visit to several other colleges and Universities in the region. Professor Mashaw’s trip therefore also took him to the University of Auckland School of Law, Victoria University Law School, University of Sydney Law School, Australian University College of Law, Adelaide University Law School, and the University of Western Australia.

During his visits, in addition to giving public lectures, he participated in seminars, faculty workshops, and conferences designed to obtain feedback on various parts of a book draft currently in progress that focuses on reason giving and legitimacy in the administrative state.  

In describing his interactions with New Zealand and Australian academics concerning his work Mashaw said: “Surprisingly enough, given differences in national systems and perspectives, my New Zealand and Australian colleagues supplied extremely worthwhile commentary on a project that is largely centered on U.S. law and practice. And the hospitality of the ‘antipodeans’ was truly extraordinary.”

Some of his talks focused on his recently published paper, “Public Reason and Administrative Legitimacy” in John Bell, et.al. eds., Public Law Adjudication in Common Law Systems: Process and Substance 11-22 (Hart Publishing, 2016).

On March 15, 2016, Mashaw and the Honorable Robert French AC, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, presented a joint program on “Judicial Deference to Administrative Discretion," sponsored by Australian University and the Australian Academy of Law, Canberra.

Remarking on that event Mashaw said: “It was a splendid example of a common experience in comparative legal analysis in which formal differences virtually disappear in the face of concrete practices. I began my presentation with U.S. administrative law’s longstanding commitment to judicial review of administrative action for reasonableness, and then described the many ways U.S. courts avoid addressing that question directly. Justice French began with the opposite deep commitment of Australian reviewing courts to avoid ruling on the merits of administrative decisions, and then described the multiple techniques Australian judges deploy for judicial oversight of the reasonableness of administrative action.”

Mashaw teaches courses on administrative law, social welfare policy, regulation, legislation, and the design of public institutions. He formerly taught at Tulane University and the University of Virginia.

In 2015, Yale Law School honored Mashaw’s work by sponsoring a special conference titled “Administrative Law from the Inside Out: A Conference on Themes in the Work of Jerry Mashaw.”

“For a generation, scholars in the field of administrative law have been engaged, provoked, informed, and inspired by the work of Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Jerry Mashaw,” said Nicholas R. Parrillo ’04, the conference organizer. This conference provided a venue for new papers on the aspects and problems of administrative law that are featured in his body of work. Those essays, edited and introduced by Professor Parrillo, will be published this year by Cambridge University Press in a volume bearing the same title.

Professor Mashaw’s many books include Administrative Law:  Introduction to the American Public Law System (7th edition 2014, with Richard Merrill, Peter Shane, Elizabeth Magill, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar and Nicholas Parillo), Bureaucratic Justice (1983), awarded Harvard University’s Gerard Henderson Memorial Prize in 1993, The Struggle for Auto Safety (with David Harfst 1990), 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 (1997), awarded the Section’s Twelfth Annual Scholarship Prize in 1998 and the Order of the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 2002 for books published between 1997 and 1999; and Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost 100 Years of American Administrative Law (2013) awarded the Section’s Annual Scholarship Prize for 2013.