Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Law
Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter And The American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932, Daniel R. Ernst
Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter And The American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932, Daniel R. Ernst
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show …