ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the technology of authority or the legal permission or obligation to act. Authority is the lodestar of American public policymaking. Authority is the oxygen that makes policy production possible. It is the most basic resource available to policymakers. The policymaking process sustains and transforms the authority of law. A constitution is a fundamental contract between people to govern themselves. The idea of constitutional authority as a technology of policy production with a distinctive set of techniques and procedures is a fundamentally American idea that has spread around the world in the past two centuries. The authority of judicial review opened a whole new avenue to those seeking to influence the meaning and application of the law. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data made patterns of bias easy to identify when an individual employer's workforce was compared with data on the industrywide availability of racial and ethnic minorities.
