The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in Carl Schmitt’s controversial assertion that the rule of law inevitably bends under the demands of state necessity during national emergencies. According to Schmitt, legal norms cannot constrain sovereign discretion during emergencies because “the precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated” in advance. The sovereign must therefore possess unfettered discretion to determine both “whether there is an extreme emergency” and “what must be done to eliminate it.” Few legal scholars have embraced Schmitt’s theory of emergencies with the enthusiasm and sophistication of Adrian Vermeule, the John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In an article published recently in the Harvard Law Review, Vermeule argues that American administrative law is fundamentally “Schmittian” in the sense that it permits federal agencies to operate outside the constraints of administrative procedure and meaningful judicial review during emergencies. Vermeule contends that the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is replete with procedural exceptions, which generate “black holes”—zones where federal agencies are free to act outside the constraints of legal order. In addition, he suggests that federal courts manipulate flexible legal standards to accord heightened deference to federal agencies during national crises, transforming standards such as “reasonableness” and “good cause” into “grey holes”—legal devices which preserve the façade, but not the reality, of the rule of law. Far from criticizing these gaps in federal administrative law, Vermeule accepts black and grey holes as institutional inevitabilities, and dismisses proposals to extend the rule of law to all administrative action as a “hopeless fantasy.”
