Volume 4, Issue 2 – Spring 2026
Articles
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Constructing the Constitutional Legitimacy of the Administrative State: Congress and the Settlement of 1946
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).
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The Civic Order of Progressive America: The Fitter Families Ideal and the Acquisition and Loss of U.S. Citizenship
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.
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The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise: an Introduction
By Maeva MarcusProfessor Marcus offers a short account of the checkered progress of the Holmes Devise.
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Reflections on the Two Most Recent Holmes Devise Histories of the Supreme Court (Including Mine)
By Mark TushnetI 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.
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Writing for the Holmes Devise
By Robert PostThe 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.”