Professor Mathews presents paper at Yale Law School

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State Law professor Jud Mathews delivered a paper on the principle of proportionality in administrative law at Yale Law School’s 2016 Conference on Comparative Administrative Law on April 30.

Mathews’ paper, “Proportionality Review in Administrative Law,” surveys the variation in how proportionality review is conducted in the administrative law of different countries.

“Proportionality review consists of a series of tests that courts apply to assess the ‘fit’ between the government's objectives and the legal means it has chosen to pursue them,” said Mathews. “It is widely used in administrative law systems around the world, to evaluate how agencies use their discretion. I argue that, notwithstanding the cross-national variations, it's possible to understand proportionality as a kind of master concept of public law that is adapted to different contexts in some predictable ways.”

Mathews’ paper, along with the other papers presented at the two-day conference, will be collected in the second edition of Comparative Administrative Law, published by Edward Elgar Publishing.  

Mathews, who holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from Yale, takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach in his scholarship to questions of public law. He has written extensively about techniques of constitutional rights adjudication in the United States and other jurisdictions, and, in particular, about proportionality review. His scholarship in administrative law has explored the political economy of judicial deference doctrines and the connections between administrative law and democratic theory.