Introduction

Executive branch interpretation of the law is a subject both timely and enduring. Just prior to the convening of this symposium, an election ended twelve years of Republican administration in which controversy over executive branch legal interpretation was greater than that in any period since the New Deal. Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush were committed to very different jurisprudential views from those which had predominated on the Supreme Court in the Warren and even Burger years. Therefore, it was not surprising that during their tenure the Department of Justice provided renewed justifications for both the autonomy and unitariness of executive branch interpretation.

If the executive could develop legal views relatively unconstrained by judicial precedent, it could more easily effect a counter-reformation of the law that the judiciary had itself transformed in the preceding decades. If the President's legal principles could be made binding on all departments and agencies, the potentially resistant bureaucracy of the sprawling administrative state could be more easily fashioned into an effective instrument for dispersion of a new legal order. Accordingly, the symposium was held at a peculiarly appropriate time for assessing the recent changes in the theory and practice of executive branch interpretation before both theory and practice are reshaped by a new and very different executive perspective. We were particularly fortunate to have Attorney General William P. Barr address the symposium and offer the last official word from the Reagan-Bush years on executive interpretation.