ABSTRACT

John A. Rohr’s scholarship fundamentally changed the intellectual landscape of public administration theory and practice (Newbold, 2012; Newbold & Rosenbloom, 2014). Over the course of his distinguished career, he demonstrated empirically how the American Constitution legitimated the field of public administration (Rohr, 1986, 1998, 2002). Rohr’s efforts to ground all dimensions of administrative theory and practice in constitutional tradition ultimately laid the intellectual foundation for the establishment of a Constitutional School of U.S. public administration. In reflecting on the value the Constitution brings to the American state and why a normatively oriented constitutional approach to public administration adds to the institutional integrity of the field, Rohr astutely observed:

The normative theory proposed is intended to encourage administrators and the public to think about administrative behavior in constitutional norms … By grounding our thinking about public administration in the Constitution, we can transform erstwhile lackeys, leakers, obstructionists, and whistle-blowers into administrative statesmen.