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Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the history of equal employment rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to document and analyze, for the first time, how administrative agencies interpret the Constitution. Although it is widely recognized that administrators must implement policy with an eye on the Constitution, neither constitutional nor administrative law scholarship has examined how administrators approach constitutional interpretation. Indeed, there is limited understanding of agencies’ core task of interpreting statutes, let alone of their constitutional practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, officials at the FCC relied on a strikingly broad and affirmative interpretation of …