Michael Seltzer

“The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.11”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In general, the natural dividing line between legislative and nonlegislative power was between rules that bound subjects and those that did not. Legal obligation seemed by nature to require consent. It therefore was assumed that the enactment of legally binding rules could come only from a representative legislature and that the resulting rules could bind only subjects, not other peoples.3 As put by John Locke, the “legislative authority” is that by which laws “are in force over the subjects of th[e] commonwealth.” Blackstone elaborated, “Legislators and their laws are said to compel and oblige.”
― Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

“And already here the danger should be evident—that government has returned to the era before constitutions, when kings or executives ruled not through law but outside it. A return to a preconstitutional era of prerogative power may not seem worrisome, for like its predecessor, administrative power often seems benign. The peril of administrative power, however, lies not in its potential for good, but in its potential for danger by unraveling government through law.”
― Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

“Some specialized types of administrative legislation require further attention—for example, determinations that make law. These determinations echo the old determinations of facts, in which an executive officer determined a factual question that was a condition of a statute’s application. Rather than being exercises of mere discernment or judgment, however, the newer style determinations often include overt exercises of lawmaking will. Such determinations arise under statutes that leave plenty of room for lawmaking. For example, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is required to specify the application of the EPA’s ambient air quality standards by publishing a list of air pollutants that “in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”9 Although statutes of this sort speak in terms of determinations and judgments, they provide for determinations of questions so abstract or loosely stated that the agencies inevitably must engage in policy choices—in legislative will rather than mere judgment. As put by Justice Thurgood Marshall in a 1970 dissent, “the factual issues with which the Secretary [of Labor] must deal are frequently not subject to any definitive resolution,” for “[c]ausal connections and theoretical extrapolations may be uncertain,” and “when the question involves determination of the acceptable level of risk, the ultimate decision must necessarily be based on considerations of policy, as well as empirically verifiable facts.” Thus, “[t]he decision to take action in conditions of uncertainty bears little resemblance to . . . empirically verifiable factual conclusions.”10 In such instances, factual determinations become exercises of lawmaking will.”
― Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?