Law Commons^™

Much of what we recognize as contemporary administrative law emerged during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when a group of legal academics attempted to aid Progressive Era and New Deal regulatory efforts by crafting a legitimating system for the federal administrative state. Their system assigned competent, expert institutions—most notably administrative agencies and the judiciary—well-defined roles: Agencies would utilize their vast, specialized knowledge and abilities to correct market failures, while courts would provide a limited but crucial oversight of agency operations. This Article focuses both on this first generation of administrative law scholarship, which included most prominently Felix Frankfurter and …