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| Design for New York State Capitol (NYSA) |
We missed this one when it first appeared:
Bennett Liebman, "a government lawyer in residence at
Albany Law School's Government Law Center," has published
Whose Board or Commission Is This Anyway? in the A
lbany Law Review 87 (2023-2024): 607-646. The paper provides a very useful overview of attempts to reorganize New York State government in the early twentieth century. It reminds me of the time when
Willard Hurst wrote to Felix Frankfurter that an HLS conference on John Marshall was all well and good, but what legal history really needed was a conference of Alfred Smith's reorganization of New York State government. Better late than never.
Liebman reproduces the following quotation of William Howard Taft to the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1915:
The study of the State government, like this of New York, with 150 different commissions spread all over the State, only arouses in me the same feeling that I have with respect to our methods of conducting our courts: profound admiration for the political adaptability of the people to make a machine work that nobody who had any real business sense would think would work under any other conditions.
--Dan Ernst
