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Juris et de Jure: Reintegrating Law & Public Administration
Osorio, Andrew
Osorio, Andrew
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Abstract
The legal foundation of American public administration is oft overlooked within the academic literature of the field. The absence of a cohesive research agenda on law and administration represents not only a major theoretical shortcoming but also a growing rift between the increasingly legalized practice of public administration and the re-search aims of a supposedly applied social science. One aspect of the remedy for these failings is a renewed engagement with academic fields occupied by questions of law and legal institutions. Therefore, ae explained in the introduction, the overarching purpose of this dissertation is to (1) analyze the ways in which law and courts affect governance when studied through the prism of public administration and legal scholarship and (2) demonstrate, through three distinct studies, the questions, theories, research settings, and methods that comprise an interdisciplinary approach to these fields.The lead study provides the first systematic and substantive assessment of Moe & Gilmour’s (1995, p. 135) assertion that “public administration has largely abandoned or forgotten its roots in public law—in the Constitution, statutes, and case law.” This work seeks a better sense of the subject matter, thematic concepts, and research settings within the public administration scholarship on law in order to assess the extent of the interdisciplinary effort necessary to reintegrate the fields. To do so, a sample taken from five generalist journals of public administration is analyzed via textual analysis to assess the last 20 years of mainstream public administration literature, exploring the extent to which law and public administration have integrated theoretically. The second study explores the effect of institutional design on the legitimacy of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by asking whether the plenary appointment power of the Chief Justice of the United States has resulted in an ideologically biased court. Measures of judicial ideology and statistical analyses are used to ex-amine whether judges appointed to this court are more likely to be conservative than the average federal judge. Beyond the immediate implications concerning the court’s oversight of our national security apparatus, this study furthers understanding of institutional design and judicial legitimacy as well as the chief justice’s role as an administrative actor in contexts beyond the Supreme Court, a function overlooked by the cur-rent literature. In the third piece, the tax expenditure of charitable giving to nonprofits is examined as a policy from (1) the administrative perspective of efficiency and effectiveness as a tool for providing public goods (using a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed studies to examine how government agency grants affect private donations to nonprofits) and (2) an historical vantage as a reflection of the organic sociolegal development of American public policy towards the taxation of charitable giving. This study is timely because during national crises—such as the current pandemic—nonprofits provide essential services and emergency assistance. However, despite their importance the question of how best to fund nonprofits remains unanswered. More broadly, one of the largest challenges for policymakers and public administrators is allocating limited government re-sources to address the chronic undersupply of public goods and the nonprofit sector has taken on a growing role as a provider, a reality with myriad implications for public management, policy, and finance. A concluding chapter summarizes and integrates the findings and implications of the introduction and the three studies outlined above.
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Date
2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Public administration, Law, governance, interdisciplinary research, public adminstration, public law