Liz Fisher wins American Bar Association Award

Warm congratulations to Professors Liz Fisher and Sidney A. Shapiro who have been jointly awarded the 2021 American Bar Association Administrative Law Section’s Annual Scholarship Award for their book Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (Cambridge University Press 2020). They share the award with Anne Joseph O’Connell for her article Actings.

The works of Fisher, Shapiro and O’Connell, are jointly recognised as the best works published in the field of administrative law during 2020. Professor Fisher received her award in a virtual ceremony on the 18^th of November, as part of the 2021 Administrative Law Conference.

Responding to her award, Professor Fisher said:

It was a joyful labour of love that took eight years of work that required myself and my co-author to dive deep into law, public administration writings, and historical scholarship so as to reconnect legal imagination to legal realities. Much of the joy came from having the most amazing co-author in Sid Shapiro. We shared a commitment to exploring and deliberating the hard issues and the differences between us.

In their book Fisher and Shapiro reimagine administrative law as the law of public administration by making its competence the focus of administrative law. The authors demonstrate why understanding the capacity and authority of expert public administration is fundamental to ensuring the legitimacy and accountability of the administrative state.

Ron Krotoszynski, Jr. Chair, ABA Administrative Law Section Annual Scholarship Award Committee has said of the book:

The committee believes that Fisher and Shapiro’s important new book will help generate a new “hard look” at the first principles of administrative law and hopefully will result in the discovery of new ways of conceptualizing and operationalizing the administrative state. In the committee’s view, no set of issues seem more pressing and important in administrative law today than these foundational questions. And thanks to Fisher and Shapiro’s thoughtful analysis and research in Administrative Competence, the administrative law community will undoubtedly begin wrestling anew with how to develop and deploy the intellectual and jurisprudential foundation needed to make good governance possible.