Investiture of Anya Bernstein as Jesse Root Professor of Law

Bureaucracy gets a bad rap. Illegitimate, unaccountable, grudging, mean—bureaucracy seems to need some extra justification to make it palatable to a democratic society. At the same time, democracy depends on bureaucracy: the decisions elected representatives make have few effects without someone to implement them. And because a steady pace of elections changes the makeup of political coalitions, the democratic decisions of the past need custodians to keep them efficacious and current over time, through change. Drawing on empirical research, this talk clears a place for bureaucracy at the heart of the democratic project. It argues that bureaucracy is the condition of possibility for democratic legitimacy in a modern mass democracy like the United States. It highlights key characteristics and functions that we should preserve, strengthen, and reform. And it explains why an attack on the administrative state is actually an attack on representative democracy itself.

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