Article

Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age

119 Yale L.J. 1362 (2010). 

The dominant story of America’s so-called “Gilded Age” describes an era of private excess and public corruption. In a rapidly industrializing society, private capital, in league with venal politicians, ran roughshod over a national state apparatus incapable of responding…

Article

Administration and "The Democracy": Administrative Law from Jackson to Lincoln, 1829-1861

117 Yale L.J. 1568 (2008).

Jacksonian America was a country in rapid transition. Intensified sectional divisions, exponential increases in urbanization and immigration, the rise of factory production, and repeated cycles of economic boom and bust helped to fuel an anxious desire for political refor…

Article

Reluctant Nationalists: Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Republican Era, 1801-1829

In 1801 the Jeffersonian Republicans took charge of Congress, the presidency, and the national administration, determined to roll back the state-building excesses of their Federalist predecessors. In this effort they were partially successful. But the tide of history and the demands of a growing nat…

Article

Recovering American Administrative Law: Federalist Foundations, 1787-1801

115 Yale L.J. 1256 (2006)

By scholarly convention, federal administrative law begins in the United States in 1887 with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Before that time the national government is perceived as a state of courts and parties in which federal administration was mi…