Mascott on Customs Laws and Delegation at the Founding

Here's another contribution to the Gundy-generated literature on delegation/nondelegation at the Founding, which we missed as an SSRN paper but is now out as Early Customs Laws and Delegation, George Washington Law Review 87 (2019): 1388-1450, by Jennifer Mascott, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University:

This past Term the Supreme Court reexamined the nondelegation doctrine, with several justices concluding that in the proper case, the Court should consider significantly strengthening the doctrine in its contemporary form. Adherents to the doctrine question whether Congress has developed a practice of improperly delegating to administrative agencies the legislative power that Congress alone must exercise under the Vesting Clause of Article I of the Constitution. Many scholars have debated the extent of the historical or textual basis for the doctrine. Instead, this Article examines interactions between executive and legislative actors during the first congressional debates on the Impost, Tonnage, Registration, and Collection of Duties Acts. In addition to revealing Congress’s central role early on, this story shows the relevance of state and congressional district interests to the legislative agreements concerning customs laws. The rich depth of these varied interests suggests that nondelegation limitations might not be inherent in the Vesting Clause alone, but may be innate to the federal government’s tripartite and federalist structural design itself.

The Constitution carefully provided significant protection for state interests through diverse representation schemes in the House and the Senate. Beyond the textual limitation of exclusive vesting of the legislative power in Congress, separation of powers principles help ensure all people’s interests are represented in a way that would not be possible via a singular, centralized administrative entity. The acts of such administrative entities are accountable, if at all, to just one centralized elected official, not to multiple elected decisionmakers representing states and regional interests. Consequently, enforcement of relatively strict nondelegation principles may be critical to preserving the structural constitutional principle that the federal government must reflect the interests of both individual members of the electorate as well as the states and regional electoral districts.

--Dan Ernst

Chabot on the Lost History of Delegation at the Founding

Christine Kexel Chabot, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, has posted The Lost History of Delegation at the Founding:

The Supreme Court is one decision away from bringing the administrative state to a grinding halt. Justice Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. United States raises grave questions about the constitutionality of countless regulatory statutes in which Congress has delegated significant policymaking authority to the executive branch. Now that Justice Kavanaugh has signaled his general agreement with this approach, Justice Gorsuch’s dissent may soon become the majority. But history does not support Justice Gorsuch’s argument that, as an originalist matter, Congress cannot delegate significant policymaking authority.

This Article demonstrates that our Republic began with a completely different understanding of Congress’s constitutionally prescribed role. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the First Congress all approved of legislation that delegated highly consequential policy decisions to the executive branch. This Article adds previously overlooked but critical historical evidence of constitutional debates leading up to these delegations, as well as the significant policies that the executive branch determined in Congress’s stead. After Alexander Hamilton proposed legislation delegating Congress’s Article I, section 8 power to “borrow Money” and “pay the Debt,” James Madison and other members of the First Congress debated this delegation and concluded that it was constitutional. The First Congress ultimately awarded President Washington and executive officers serving on the Sinking Fund Commission borrowing and payment authority that implicated financial policy decisions of the utmost importance to our national economy. The First Congress also delegated its power under the Intellectual Property Clause when it passed a bare-bones patent act that required executive officers including Thomas Jefferson to establish important substantive and procedural rules of patent law. Hamilton, Madison, and the First Congress never understood the Constitution to require that Congress decide all of the important policy questions, and the Supreme Court will create an unprecedented constitutional requirement if it requires Congress to start doing so now.

See also this.

–Dan Ernst

Fellowship on European Administrative History

Our friends at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History have announced the JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History.  The deadline is September 30, 2020:

"The scholarship is intended to benefit the next generation of researchers [in the field of European Administrative History], particularly doctoral and post-doctoral students, to enable them to complete their research project in as brief a period as possible, ordinarily up to a maximum of 6 months. The scholarship is based on the usual rates for doctoral fellowships of the German Research Foundation (DFG).***

"Early stage researchers from Germany and abroad are invited to apply. In accordance with the thematic and methodological spectrum covered by the JEV, the scholarship is open to all historical disciplines, provided the research project addresses an aspect of European administrative history or history of administrative law from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The relevance of the research topic should not be restricted to a particular national context. Comparative research questions are particularly welcome. It is expected that the research results will be published."

--Dan Ernst

Resh on the Administrative Presidency and the Degradation of the Civil Service

William G. Resh, University of Southern California Sl Price School of Public Policy, has posted The Administrative Presidency and the Degradation of the United States Civil Service through Political Time, which is forthcoming in the Handbook of Public Administration (Routledge):

The study of the administrative presidency is one that more obviously, though not uniquely, overlaps the research interests of both self-identifying public management and political science scholars. How a president’s managerial strategies are applied has profound implications on how one thinks about the role of federal public administrators in the United States’ polity and constitutional design. However, those strategies are not merely a function of the preferences and agency of a given president or presidential administration. Time presents a critical, if overlooked, macro-level embeddedness attribute in which individual decisions and behavior are nested. The timing in which a president operates within a political epoch and his ideological positioning vis-à-vis the dominant ideology within that epoch will have a vast influence on the alternative sets that are allowed for that president, his proxies, and career bureaucrats to consider. In this essay, I seek to bridge this macro-perspective of public administration with the micro-level foundations of behavioralism by providing an example of how these secular, historical trends can produce observable and predictable patterns by which we can assess variation of executive and bureaucratic behaviors across temporal contexts.

–Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The Federal Judicial Center has a new documentary history in its series of Famous Federal Trials: U.S. v. Albert B. Fall: The Teapot Dome Scandal, by Jake Kobrick.

• New online from American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic: Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France: 1870s–1913, by James Donovan. 

• Here is an excellent webpage on digital archival research by the Mina Rees Library off the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.   

• “The University of New Brunswick has removed George Duncan Ludlow's name from its law faculty building in Fredericton after concerns were raised last year over his involvement in residential schools and his legal endorsement of slavery.” (CBC).

• Ryan Shymansky, a 2019 Georgetown Law graduate, has published the note The Great Bulwark of ...Political Liberties”: The Decline of Jury Power and the Rise of Slave Interests in the Early American Republic in the Georgetown Law Journal.  It originated as a paper for my Georgetown law colleague John Mikhail. DRE

•  ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen reviews Robert Dallek's presidential history, How Did We Get Here?  (WaPo).  Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, Michigan Law, on the fopunders and the nondelegation doctrine (The Atlantic).  Ken Bridges on Heman Sweatt and the integration of University of Texas Law School (Waco Today).

• Update: Stephen Vladeck on the federal government's authority to use troops in Minneapolis: the thread and the historical article.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Federal Grazing Policy, 1891-1950

Harold Ickes (center); Edward Taylor (left) LC

[Longtime LHB readers will recall that for the exam in my legal history course I write an essay about some regulatory regime I did not cover in class and ask students to compare it with the ones we did.  The topics of previous essays include motor carrier regulation, meat inspection, and the US Commerce Court.  This year’s essay, on federal grazing policy, follows.  Dan Ernst.]

The federal government once owned all the land in the continental United States, except for the original thirteen colonies and Texas. It disposed of most of the land in the East and Midwest through land sales, overseen by the General Land Office (GLO), an agency within the Department of the Interior.  After the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, Americans could obtain title to 160 acres by paying a small fee, making some improvements, and residing on the “homestead” for five years.  By the 1890s, most fertile land was in private hands, but most of the land west of the 100th meridian, a line running from North Dakota through Texas, had too little rainfall for crops without irrigation and remained in the public domain.  The land was chiefly valuable for grazing, principally beef cattle, run by stockmen in specific ranges, and sheep, herded over great distances.  Aside from scattered homesteads (ultimately expanded to 640 acres for ranches), use of the public domain was unregulated, as the GLO’s mission was to distribute land and not to plan its wise use.  Range wars between large and small cattle operators and between cattle stockmen and sheep herders abounded.  The latter conflicts were particularly intense, because sheep left grass too short for cattle to graze upon, and cattle refused to graze where sheep were pasturing.  Cattlemen referred to sheep as “hoofed locusts,” yet, as Farrington Carpenter, a Colorado stockman who will play a large role in our story, once complained, “We had no way of keeping a sheep man off a cow range.”

Shugerman on the Imaginary Unitary Executive and the Decisions of 1789

Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Fordham Law School, has posted "The Decisions of 1789 Were Non-Unitary: Removal by Judiciary and the Imaginary Unitary Executive," it two installments, Part 1 and Part 2.  Here is the abstract:

James Madison (LC)

Supporters of the unitary executive rely on “the Decision of 1789” to establish an originalist basis for presidential removal power at will. However, the first Congress’s legislative debates and a diary (missed by legal scholars) suggest strategic ambiguity and retreat on the constitutional questions, and the Treasury Act contradicted the unitary model. Here are seven overlooked moments from 1789 that dispel unitary assumptions:

1. The “decision” is premised on an ambiguous text and an indecisive unicameral legislative history. The switch from explicit power to a contingency clause was likely strategic ambiguity to get the bill passed in the Senate and to move forward on an urgent legislative agenda. House opponents called this move a retreat and questioned its integrity…
2. …and a Senator’s diary indicates the Senate sponsors, to win passage, denied the clause was important, disclaimed its constitutional meaning, and disavowed even the presidential power itself. A cryptic comment by a presidential House member hinted at this strategy.
3. Justices have erred in claiming that the first Congress decided officers served “at will.” Few members of Congress spoke in favor of presidential removal at pleasure in 1789. The first Congress gave such a low degree of protection to only two offices: marshals and deputy marshals. Meanwhile, in the Treasury debate, opponents of presidential removal power warned against presidential corruption and successfully deleted (without needing debate) a provision that the Treasury Secretary would “be removable at the pleasure of the President.”
4. A tale of two Roberts: two finance ministers, one English, one during the Articles of Confederation era, both scandalous. A reference by Madison during the Treasury debate provide context for independent checks, as opposed to a unitary hierarchy.
5. Judges and scholars have missed that Madison proposed that the Comptroller, similar to a judge, should have tenure “during good behavior.” Though Madison dropped this proposal, the debate reflected his more consistent support for congressional power and how little had been decided in the Foreign Affairs debate.
6. Most problematic for the unitary theory, the Treasury Act’s anti-corruption clause established removal by judges: Offenders “shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor… and shall upon conviction be removed from Office.” The 1789 debates had focused on presidential corruption of finance, and this clause allowed relatively independent prosecutors and judges to check presidential power. Congress added similar judicial removal language to five other statutes between 1789 and 1791, and many more over the next 30 years.
7. These debates pilloried prerogative powers and discussed justiciability of for-cause removals in the English writ tradition, suggesting a larger role for Congress and the courts to investigate presidential power.

For the powers cited by unitary theorists (the constitutional basis for presidential removal power, offices held “during pleasure”), the first Congress was, in fact, indecisive. On whether the president had exclusive removal power, the first Congress decisively answered no. If post-ratification history is relevant to constitutional meaning, the “Decision of 1789” presents more challenge than support for the unitary theory, with implications for Seila Law v. CFPB, independent agencies, independent prosecutors, the Trump subpoena cases, and justiciability.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita, the author of Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (2011, and a great promoter of the history of women in the legal profession has died. Here's Stanford's press release. 

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts concludes its Celebrate Diversity Month in Common Threads of Justice by joining with Supreme Court Historical Society in the program Ladies of Legend: The First Generation of American Women Attorneys.

• Here's a "sixty-second lecture"  on the legal history of epidemics in Modern America by Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. And by LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi: Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history

• Congratulations to Jennifer Mnookin, a historian of the law of evidence, Erika Lee, a historian of immigration law and policy, and my law dean William Treanor, a constitutional historian of the Founding, upon their induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I was also very pleased to see my Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin among the inductees.  DRE

•  Have you noted the National Archives and Records Administration platform, History Hub?  It “connects agencies, researchers, and a bevy of citizen archivists within its online community to help the public through its research journeys.”  The latest episode announces Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series: A Match Made in History.

• Julian Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley’s attack on the originalist case for the nondelegation in American constitutional law has prompted two responses on SSRN by Ilan Wurman and Aaron Gordon. 

• ICYMI: Richard Lazarus’s Rule of Five, on Massachusetts v. EPA, in Harvard Law Today.The NYT obit of Richard Sobol, who went from Columbia Law to Arnold, Fortas & Porter to the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in 1965.

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Chen on the Chinese Tradition of Administrative Law

Albert H. Y. Chen, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has posted The Chinese Tradition of Administrative Law:

For most of the time during the last two millennia, China was a dynastic empire ruled by an emperor with the assistance of a highly developed mandarinate of imperial organs. “Administrative law” in the modern sense of a set of legal norms enacted by the legislature or developed by the judiciary that simultaneously empower and constrain state organs and officials for the purpose of protecting the rights and liberties of subjects or citizens did not exist in traditional China. But there did exist for more than two millenniums elaborate and sophisticated rules regulating the powers and functions of each component of the highly complex and extensive machinery of imperial organs and officials, and prescribing in detail the duties of officials as well as the multiple and complicated monitoring, supervisory and disciplinary mechanisms applicable to the exercise of powers and performance of duties by officials in different state organs.

By the late 19th century, Qing China’s increasing subordination to Western imperialism and semi-colonialism convinced significant numbers of Chinese political and scholarly elite that there was a desperate need for China to “save” and strengthen itself by pursuing modernization. In the legal and political domains, this generally meant extensive borrowing or transplant of Western political and legal institutions. After China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Japan’s experience of successful modernisation was widely admired by Chinese intellectuals, and the Japanese model was perceived as one that China should imitate in its self-strengthening efforts.

This essay will therefore begin with the introduction and reception of Japanese administrative law in China in the late Qing Dynasty. It will then survey the study of comparative law and the influence of foreign law on the development of Chinese administrative law in the Republic of China era (1911–1949) and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949-). Major developments in Chinese administrative law in both the Republican era and the Communist era will also be briefly outlined as the context of administrative law scholarship. It will be seen that the story of the study of comparative and foreign administrative law in modern China is very closely intertwined with the story of the development of Chinese administrative law itself.

--Dan Ernst

Bamzai on Tenure of Office and the Treasury

Aditya Bamzai, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Tenure of Office and the Treasury: The Constitution and Control over National Financial Policy, 1787 to 1867, forthcoming in the George Washington University Law Review 87 (2019): 101-188:

The disputed scope of the President’s authority to remove subordinates in the executive branch, and to direct them in the performance of their functions, is one of the central issues of federal constitutional law. On the one hand, some argue that Article II gives the President such authority. By contrast, others claim that the Constitution allows Congress to regulate the tenure of office of executive branch officers by limiting the President’s removal power.

In the context of this debate, some have argued that financial institutions—the components of the “treasury”—were historically insulated from presidential control. They rely on early Congresses’ creation of several commissions with the Chief Justice as a member, establishment of the First and Second Banks of the United States, and use of distinct language to establish the Department of the Treasury and some of its officers. This Article shows that these claims are incorrect. Drawing on congressional and executive sources, case law, and contemporaneous treatises, this Article demonstrates that the prevailing view in the years between the Constitution’s adoption and the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson was that financial government institutions were no different from other parts of the federal government for purposes of presidential control. The President had the constitutional authority to remove officials within the Department of the Treasury. The institutions over which presidential control was conspicuously lacking—the First and Second Banks of the United States—were generally understood to be private, rather than arms of the government, and to perform non-sovereign functions. But to the extent the Bank was understood to perform sovereign functions, its opponents argued that it did so impermissibly, using a variation of the modern argument that Congress may not delegate such functions to private entities. This Article’s exploration of these issues both bears on contemporary debates about the scope of the President’s removal power and shows how early expositors of the Constitution understood the allocation of federal government control over national financial policy.

--Dan Ernst

Akech on Judicial Review in Kenya

Migai Akech, University of Nairobi, has posted Judicial Review in Kenya: The Ambivalent Legacy of English, which is forthcoming in Judicial Review of Administrative Action: Origins and Adaptations Across the Common Law World, ed. Lawin Swati Jhaveri and Michael Ramsden (Cambridge University Press, 2020):

This Chapter considers the evolutions in the practice of judicial review in Kenya, and the continued relevance of English law, in the broader context of the role of judicial review in facilitating the attainment of democratic governance. It argues that English law bequeathed to Kenya an ambivalent legacy that continues to shape the exercise of the judicial review power. In theory, law has promised to provide a bulwark against the abuse of governmental power. In practice, however, it has largely served to facilitate authoritarianism. The Chapter begins by locating judicial review in the context of governance in colonial and post-colonial Kenya. It then examines the nature and role of judicial review in the Kenya colony, Independent Kenya, and more recently after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

--Dan Ernst

Price on Congressional Authority over Military Officers

Zachary Price, University of California Hastings College of the Law, has posted Congressional Authority Over Military Offices, which is forthcoming in the Texas Law Review:

While scholars have explored at length the constitutional law of office-holding with respect to civil and administrative offices, recent scholarship has largely neglected parallel questions regarding military office-holding. Even scholars who defend broad congressional authority to structure civil administration typically presume that the President as Commander in Chief holds greater authority over the military. For its part, the executive branch has claimed plenary authority over assignment of military duties and control of military officers.

This pro-presidential consensus is mistaken. Although the President, as Commander in Chief, must have some form of directive authority over U.S. military forces in the field, the constitutional text and structure, read in light of longstanding historical practice, give Congress extensive power to structure offices, chains of command, and disciplinary mechanisms through which the President’s authority is exercised. In particular, just as in the administrative context, Congress may vest particular authorities—authority to launch nuclear weapons or a cyber operation, for example, or command over particular units—in particular statutorily created offices. In addition, although the Constitution affords Presidents removal authority as a default disciplinary mechanism, Congress may supplant and limit this authority by replacing it with alternative disciplinary mechanisms, such as criminal penalties for disobeying lawful orders.

By defining duties, command relationships, and disciplinary mechanisms in this way, Congress may establish structures of executive branch accountability that promote key values, protect military professionalism, and even encourage or discourage particular results, all without infringing upon the President’s ultimate authority to direct the nation’s armed forces. These conclusions are relevant pending Supreme Court cases regarding military discipline and presidential removal authority. They also bear directly on pending legislative proposals to vest authority over cyber weapons, force withdrawals, or nuclear weapons in officers other than the President. From a broader perspective, they shed new light on separation-of-powers debates over the “unitary” executive branch, conventions of governmental behavior, the civil service’s constitutionality, and Reconstruction’s historical importance.

-Dan Ernst

Tan on the Fed's Independence

Caroline W. Tan, a JD student at the NYU Law School, has posted What the Federal Reserve Board Tells Us About Agency Independence, which is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review 95 (April 2020): 101-135.  NYU Law’s Samuel Issacharoff supervised her writing of the note, which originated in an undergraduate thesis at Yale supervised by Naomi Lamoreaux.

FDR Dedicates New FRB Building, 1937 (LC)

In administrative law, the sine qua non of agency independence lies in the enabling statute. If the statute protects the agency’s head from removal except “for cause,” then the agency is considered insulated from Presidential control and classified as independent. On the other hand, if the statute is silent on for-cause tenure protection, then the agency is classified as executive. This Note questions that central assumption by relying on the history of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, arguably one of the most independent agencies in Washington. By tracing the Board’s history from a limited institution in 1913 to the powerful central bank of today, this Note demonstrates that in at least some cases, the driving factors behind operative independence have more to do with the practical realities of governance than the formalities of administrative law. Indeed, even though the Fed’s enabling statute is silent on the issue of for-cause tenure protection, the President has never fired the head of the agency. Even President Trump has declined to go so far. This Note addresses this paradox through a detailed look at the Board’s history and the major inflection points in its rise. Throughout, this Note also highlights the active role that the Board played in its own ascendency, demonstrating the dynamic life of administrative agencies and the powerful role they can play in shaping their own futures.

 Here's the TOC:

Introduction
I.   The Inevitable Conflict between the President and the Board
II.   The Board’s Evolution
A.    Independence Through Internal Reorganization: The Banking Act of 1935
B.    Independence Through Symbolism: The Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951
C.    Independence Through Power: The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956
III.   Implications for Administrative Law
Conclusion

--Dan Ernst

Milligan on Plessy, Housing,and the Administrative Constitution

Joy Milligan, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, has posted Plessy Preserved: Agencies and the Effective Constitution, which is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal:

Sometimes the judicial Constitution is not the one that matters. The administrative state is capable of creating divergent legal frameworks that powerfully shape public life. But to the extent that they reside outside of judicial precedent, such administrative regimes may go unrecognized.

In this Article, I chart the history of an alternative “administrative Constitution” that remains etched in U.S. cities. Drawing on original archival research, I show that throughout the twentieth century, the federal administrators who oversaw the nation’s public-housing program implemented and defended a legal regime based on Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” principle — even after the judiciary announced the opposing mandate of Brown v. Board of Education, and after the political branches adopted formal civil-rights reforms in the 1960s. Why did an agency led by liberal reformers and dedicated to serving the poor do this? Administrators believed the public-housing program was politically unsustainable without racial segregation, while agency lawyers argued for preserving the older framework, which had once been understood as a progressive triumph in its commitment to racial “equity.” Procedural barriers shielded the agency from defending that entrenched framework in the courts.

Uncovering public housing’s racial Constitution challenges conventional legal narratives around civil rights by foregrounding the role of federal administrators in thwarting Brown. Simultaneously, Plessy’s resilience in the administrative realm underscores the ongoing need to unearth such regimes, to better assess agencies’ role in establishing the constitutional principles that actually govern us — that is, in determining the effective Constitution.

--Dan Ernst

Manners and Menand on the Presidential Removal Power

Jane Manners and Lev Menand, Academic Fellows and Lecturers in Law, Columbia Law School, have posted Removal Permissions and the Forgotten Tenure of a Term of Years:

Just seven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen “independent agencies”: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and for INM only. While these words establish the contours of these agencies’ “independent” character, there is no consensus about what they mean, and thus, the extent of agency independence. This Article addresses that gap. It resurrects the lost history of removal law and defines INM. It shows that neglect of duty and malfeasance in office are common law terms relating to faithful execution that date back hundreds of years and that inefficiency is a nineteenth century concept having to do with government waste and ineptitude. It further shows that INM provisions are not removal “protections” as they have come to be interpreted in recent years, but removal permissions. Where present, they expand the President’s power by authorizing him to remove officials who are tenured for a term-of-years, a tenure long understood to bar removal—for any reason—by the President in the middle of an officer’s term. Three conclusions follow. First, INM was not written to empower the President to direct agency actions. Independent agencies heads really were meant to exercise their discretionary authority independently. Second, even under an expansive reading of Article II, “for cause” removal provisions do not conflict with the Constitution’s Take Care Clause. INM permits the President to combat “unfaithful execution” by empowering him to remove officials for neglect of duty and malfeasance in office. Third, courts have erred by regularly reading INM into enabling statutes that are silent on removal. Where such statutes create offices “for years,” they presumptively prohibit removal—whether summarily or for cause.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• The conference Critical Legal Studies: Intellectual History and the history of the present, will be held at Princeton University, on February 27-28, 2020.  “Prompted by plans to create a Critical Legal Studies Archive at the Princeton University Mudd Library, the conference will bring together those who participated in CLS in its heyday; key figures from contemporaneous movements in the US and abroad; and people interested today in this history and its contemporary significance.”  The conference is free and open to the public and sponsored by Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.

• Over at Lawfare: Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law, on The Mexican-American War and Constitutional War Powers.

• Kellen Funk, Columbia Law, has Twitter-reviewed Mortenson and Bagley's Nondelegation at the Founding.

• At The Historical Society of the New York State Courts: A biographical sketch of Harold Arnoldus Stevens.  Also, a YouTube video in which member of the Society's Board of Trustees discusses "how we have tragically lost details of historic NY events of national importance."
  

• ICYMI: Exploring the history of Underground Railroad, in the Youngstown Vindicator.  Brooklyn’s courts celebrate Black History Month, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  One barrister's love for the horse hair wig, courtesy of the ABC and Law Fuel.   Law in frontier Oregon, in the Redmond Spokesman.  Better late than never: The NYT obituary of Homer Plessy.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Mortenson and Bagley on Delegation at the Founding

Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, University of Michigan Law School, have posted Delegation at the Founding:

This article refutes the claim that the nondelegation doctrine was part of the original constitutional understanding. As a matter of theory, there was no constitutional problem with delegating the authority to make rules so long as Congress did not irrevocably alienate its power to legislate. Any particular use of such delegated authority could validly be characterized as the exercise of either executive or legislative power, depending on the relationships a speaker wished to emphasize. Either way, there was no basis to claim that the Constitution prohibited administrative rulemaking of any sort. As a matter of practice, the early federal Congresses adopted dozens of laws that broadly empowered executive and judicial actors to adopt binding rules of conduct for private parties on some of the most consequential policy questions of the era. Yet the people who drafted and debated the Constitution virtually never raised objections to delegation as such, even as they feuded bitterly over many other questions of constitutional meaning.

--Dan Ernst

"The Public's Law" Symposium: Emerson Responds

 [This is the third of three posts from an "author-meets reader" session on Blake Emerson's The Public's Law, held at the American Society for Legal History at its annual meeting on November 22, 2019.  The series begins here, with my summary of the book and continues with Noah Rosenblum's comment.  What follows is the response of Blake Emerson, Assistant Professor of Law at UCLA.  DRE.]

It is an honor to have the opportunity to continue discussing The Public’s Law here on the Legal History Blog. The author-meets-readers panel that Dan Ernst, Anne Kornhauser, Noah Rosenblum, and I participated in at the American Society for Legal History Conference was a great occasion to discuss the book with scholars whose work and insights shaped the argument. Here I’d like to continue that conversation, focusing on a few key issues: the motivation for the book, the role of Hegelian ideas in American Progressivism, and the promise of studying legal history from a normative perspective.

"The Public's Law" Symposium: Rosenblum Comments

[This is the second of three posts from an "author-meets reader" session on Blake Emerson's The Public's Law, held at the American Society for Legal History at its annual meeting on November 22, 2019.  My summary of the book on that occasion is here.  Below is a slight revision of the comment Noah A. Rosenblum delivered at session.  Mr. Rosenblum is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University and a Program Affiliate Scholar at the NYU School of Law.  DRE.]

Blake Emerson's The Public's Law is a significant intervention that deserves the attention of legal historians in particular.  It was born as a dissertation in political theory.  But we should not hold that against it.  Except for its last chapter, the work is completely given over to history.  Although framed as a normative argument of historical recovery, it intervenes in two important historical debates of special interest to our community.  First, The Public's Law suggests a new dimension to the world of "Atlantic Crossings" in the late 19th and early 20th century that intellectual historians like James Kloppenberg and Dan Rodgers helped frame nearly 30 years ago.  And second, it contributes to ongoing conversations about how we understand the nature and development of the administrative state-and so speaks to both political historians interested in the history of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights years, and legal historians writing the new history of administration and administrative constitutionalism.  I'll have more to say about these historiographical interventions later.  For now, I just want to hammer on this book's relevance for legal history.  The Public's Law is more explicit about its normativity than most historians like.  And, because of the disciplinary divisions of the academy, it comes dressed up as a book that's more for philosophers or lawyers.  But it is decidedly a book that intellectual, political, and legal historians will have to grapple with.

I'd like to focus this contribution on three specific arguments advanced in The Public's Law.  Ernst's post has already explained how Emerson traces the way German Hegelianism worked its ways into the thought of leading Progressive reformers, and, through them, into some of the basic structures of American government.  I want to zero-in on three moments in this progression, and highlight how the argument advanced in The Public's Law challenges our received understandings: (1) first, its account of the meaning and ramifications of Hegelianism, (2) second, its description of the legacy of the Hegelian reception in the United States, and (3) third, its reading of the New Deal and the Civil Rights reforms.

Emerson's "The Public's Law": An LHB Symposium

[The annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History last November included an author-meets-readers session on Blake Emerson’s The Public’s Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019).  At it, I summarized the book.  Anne Kornhauser, Associate Professor in the History Department of the City College of New York and Associate Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center; and Noah Rosenblum, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University and a Program Affiliate Scholar at the NYU School of Law, provided comments, to which Emerson, Assistant Professor of Law at UCLA, responded.

[We will link to Kornhauser's revised and extended comment when it appears in the New Rambler Review.  This post is my summary of the book.  Rosenblum's comment and Emerson's response will appear in future posts.  DRE]

In Thinking Like Your Editor (2002), Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato suggested a strategy for injecting narrative tension into serious nonfiction.  An author begins by describing some problem that has been bugging her and then explains that the book represents her search for an answer.  If the author does  that much properly, the reader will think, “You know, now that she mentions it, that problem has been bothering me, too.  I’m not exactly sure where her search would take me, but she seems to be a smart cookie who'll have interesting things to say along the way.  I’ll tag along and see whether she finds her answer.”  Narrative tension, then, is provided by the author’s search for an answer.

Emerson’s problem, speaking generally, is the political legitimacy of the administrative state in a democratic United States. The book resulting from his search for an answer has an introduction, a conclusion, and four chapters.  He uses three methodologies: (1) intellectual history (in Chapters 1 and 2); (2) institutional history (in Chapter 3); and (3) what Emerson calls “normative reconstruction” (in Chapter 4).  The answer he arrives at is a kind of bureaucracy that brings the people into the state, new forms of deliberative democratic control within administration itself."  The deliberation is not so much “formally equal, contracting persons” as “relational beings whose identities, interests, and values are formed in joint discourse and action.”  It is a relational state based on the belief that “the conditions of freedom” require that people actively determined the principles and policies by which they were bound.  The result is “the public’s law.”