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The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a "precept of managerial responsibility," which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature of public administration: judgment accountability, balance, and rationality. We apply this precept to one of the most vexing problems of public administration theory and practice, institutional reform litigation. This application illustrates how the precept solves a major theoretical problem of American public administration by defining a role for administrative officers that fully comports with the Madisonian scheme of separated institutions-legislative, executive, and judicial-sharing power.
Introduction
The doctrine of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration and management. Woodrow Wilson observed that "[t]here is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible" (1887, 213). Any answer to the dangers of bureaucracy, argues John Pfiffner (1935, 19), "combines power with responsibility." For David Levitan (1946, 566), "[t]he problem of the responsibility of administrative officials in a democracy is the very crux of the problem of the maintenance of the democratic system." Frederick Mosher (1968, 7; 1992, 201) writes, "[r]esponsibility may well be the most important word in all the vocabulary of administration, public and private [,] ... the first requisite of a democratic state."1
This focus on responsibility was a logical outgrowth of the realization that administrative discretion is essential to governance in the modern American state, and that administration that is responsible in the exercise of that discretion is a preeminent goal in achieving "good government" (Redford 1958; Lynn forthcoming).2 These classic authors further implied that the goal of responsible administration is to balance collective justice-defined by legislatures and the Bentleyan (1908) "parallelogram" of interest group forces-and individual justice, to which individual citizens are entitled under the Constitution.3 Indeed, this balance has Aristotelian roots: collective justice is "[o]ne form of partial justice ... found in the distribution of honors, of material goods, or of anything else that can be divided among those who have a share in the political system," while individual justice resembles...