Scott Jones has published his YLJ note, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: A Public-Rights Paradox:
This Note reconstructs a historical regime that empowered inferior officers to decide matters of life, liberty, and property without judicial oversight. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 created a federal administrative apparatus that adjudicated core private rights through federal commissioners who rendered binding, final decisions without the safeguards of Article III.
The administration of this Act challenges the coherence of the modern public-rights doctrine, which purports to draw a formal line between public- and private-rights adjudications. Yet the 1850 Act exposes how that distinction collapses when federal power demands. This Note demonstrates that neither the imperative-necessity nor historical-tradition exceptions can adequately justify this regime within existing constitutional limits. Instead, it argues that the public-rights doctrine has functioned less as a principled constraint on the separation of powers than as a justification that expands to accommodate the state’s political needs.
As courts increasingly rely on historical tradition to define constitutional boundaries in administrative law, this Note shows that historical tradition is far less clear-cut than the “Grand Narrative” of modern administrative law suggests. It reveals that the separation between judicial and administrative power has been shaped by political necessity rather than fixed constitutional principle. The Act complicates the prevailing narratives in administrative law and originalist thought, urging a reevaluation of how constitutional meaning is constructed and state power legitimized.
--Dan Ernst
