In a crucial moment in the history of the administrative state in 1946, Congress played a central legitimizing role by enacting the Employment Act, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and the Legislative Reorganization Act (LRA).
In the first third of the twentieth century, American leaders affiliated with both political parties and the broader Progressive movement restructured the nation’s “legal civic order” to advance a Fitter Families ideal of American citizenship.
Professor Marcus offers a short account of the checkered progress of the Holmes Devise.
I believe that Post addresses concerns about how judges worked the ideas into their opinions by seeing the Justices as proto-philosophers (or proto-legal-academics), who have a deep commitment to developing coherent schemas.
The essential ambition of the Taft Court volume was to invite legal historians to once again conceptualize judges and their courts as cultural actors who respond to the same sets of tensions and challenges as those that spur all cultural actors to give meaning to their times. Tushnet is off base to dismiss this approach as a form of “conceptualism.”
Contemporary disputes involving the separation of powers take on a different light when they are framed in terms of powers of the Government of the United States itself. The “all other powers” provision of the Necessary and Proper Clause distinguishes government powers from executive powers and gives Congress distinct legislative authorities with respect to each of these categories.
For Ken Kersch, developments in twentieth-century American constitutional law could not be adequately explained by either neat doctrinal evolution or the raw exercise of political power.
Ken Kersch’s remarkable scholarship generates profound questions about the difficulties—and even limits—of truly engaging with those who do not share certain ontological or epistemological commitments.
Ken Kersch showed us that constitutional development is not a story of inevitable progress, but of contested traditions, shifting coalitions, and the discontinuous, non-linear unfolding of political development.
By broadening the terrain of political and constitutional thought, Kersch brilliantly examined how constitutional faiths are forged and “law stories” are woven to create common identities.