Ronald Dworkin once imagined law as an empire and judges as its princes. But over time, the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state. Adrian Vermeule argues that law has freely abandoned its imperial pretensions, and has done so for internal legal reasons.

In area after area, judges and lawyers, working out the logical implications of legal principles, have come to believe that administrators should be granted broad leeway to set policy, determine facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, and even define the boundaries of their own jurisdiction. Agencies have greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront many issues than lawyers and judges do. And as the questions confronting the state involving climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology (to name a few) have become ever more complex, legal logic increasingly indicates that abnegation is the wisest course of action.

As Law’s Abnegation makes clear, the state did not shove law out of the way. The judiciary voluntarily relegated itself to the margins of power. The last and greatest triumph of legalism was to depose itself.

A Penchant for Prejudice combines a detailed empirical study of the decision-making practices of judges with a sophisticated theoretical argument which exposes contemporary myths about judging and suggests methods of incorporating the inevitable bias that is detected in this and other studies. Based on a unique study of the decisions of Social Security judges, the book challenges the meaning of judicial impartiality. Linda G. Mills finds that, in practice, bias is a consistent dimension of what is considered "impartial" decision-making. The results reveal that impartiality as the legal system now defines it, is itself a form of bias, and that a historically and contextually sensitive definition of bias, one which takes account of the communities and cultures that come to be judged in the legal system, must overcome the modern dualistic notion of imparitality as the exclusion of bias in order to respond to needs of the diversity of applicants and the judges who adjudicate their claims. According to Mills, the judicial bias she found reflected in her study seems not only to essentialize and stereotype applicants but also prevents judges from engaging vulnerable claimants in a way that the legal process positively demands. A Penchant for Prejudice will be of interest to students and scholars of law, judicial decisionmaking, and discrimination. Linda G. Mills is Assistant Professor of Social Welfare and Law, University of California, Los Angeles.