{"id":49540,"date":"2019-07-11T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T07:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=49540"},"modified":"2019-07-10T10:16:07","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T14:16:07","slug":"the-genesis-of-the-administrative-state-during-the-great-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/07\/11\/the-genesis-of-the-administrative-state-during-the-great-depression\/","title":{"rendered":"The genesis of the administrative state during the Great Depression"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leonid Sirota<\/a> provides some interesting background on the rise of the administrative state during the 1930s:<\/p>\n

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Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

To a degree that is, I think, unusual among other areas of the law, administrative law in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada is riven by a conflict about its underlying institution. To be sure there, there are some constitutional lawyers who speak of getting rid of judicial review of legislation and so transferring the constitution to the realm of politics, rather than law, but that’s very much a minority view. Labour unions have their critics, but not so much among labour lawyers. But the administrative state is under attack from within the field of administrative law. It has, of course, its resolute defenders too, some of them going so far as to argue that the administrative state has somehow become a constitutional requirement.<\/p>\n

In an interesting article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State<\/a>” [PDF] recently published in the Notre Dame Law Review<\/em>, Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson challenge the defenders of the administrative state by pointing out its intellectual origins in what they persuasively argue was<\/p>\n