A Bradley for Philip Hamburger

I am pleased to note the announcement yesterday that Professor Philip Hamburger is one of four recipients of the 2017 Bradley Prize. The Bradley Prize will be awarded to Professor Hamburger at a ceremony to be held on April 6, 2017 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, D.C. The award carries a stipend of $250,000.

I wrote Professor Hamburger to congratulate him. I thought readers might be interested in his response:

Dear Scott,

I am most grateful for the award and, indeed, for your support. I don’t mind that academia can be a lonely existence for someone of dissenting views, but still, it is nice to find one has friends out there! You have been most generous, and although the most important result has been to advance the fight against the administrative state, I am grateful for the sense of having allies . . . and for the ability (a result of the prize) to pay for our son’s day care!

I hope one day we have a chance to meet.

Best wishes, Philip

Philip Hamburger
Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law
Columbia Law School

Here I want to reiterate a personal note. Three years ago, as I looked around online for scholarship that would help me understand the dubious constitutionality of the administrative state, I discovered that Professor Hamburger’s book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? was forthcoming in 2014 from the University of Chicago Press. Professor Hamburger’s book addressed the question I to which I sought the answer. Spoiler alert: His answer regarding the purported constitutionality and lawfulness of the regime of administrative law was No! in thunder (as Melville said of “the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne”).

Urging the editors of National Review to review the book when it came out, I was instead sent a review copy by Rich Lowry and Michael Potemra. They invited me to put up. For me the book represented an awakening. That’s what I tried to convey in my review of the book.

In addition, we posted an interview with Professor Hamburger on Power Line. In 2015 we posted his column Chevron‘s last days?”

The Library of Law & Liberty posted an outstanding podcast with Professor Hamburger that remains accessible online. Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center hosted Professor Hamburger for a fantastic lecture about the book upon its publication (video below).

Last year the Manhattan Institute awarded Is Administrative Law Unlawful its Hayek Book Prize. The institute has posted Professor Hamburger’s Hayek Lecture here with a preface by Amity Shlaes and an introduction by former New York Times columnist John Tierney (video below).

Myron Magnet reviewed Professor Hamburger’s book for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal in 2015 in “The dead Constitution.” The new issue of City Journal publishes Professor Hamburger’s essay “How government agencies usurp our rights.”

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