Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01857
Abstract
Written for a dispersed agrarian population using hand tools in a local economy, our Constitution now controls an American government orders of magnitude larger that has had to respond to profound changes in transportation, communication, technology, economy, and scientific understanding. How did our government get to this place? The agencies Congress has created to meet these changes now face profound new challenges: transition from the paper to the digital age; the increasing centralization in an opaque, political presidency of decisions that Congress has assigned to diverse, relatively expert and transparent bodies; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within agencies themselves; and the increasing judicial use of analytic techniques invoking the expectations of those who wrote the Constitution so long ago and in such different circumstances. Never easy, finding the appropriate balance between law and politics presents major challenges today.
Disciplines
Administrative Law | Law | Law and Economics | Law and Politics | President/Executive Department | Science and Technology Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Peter L. Strauss,
How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place,
150(3)
Daedalus
17
(2021).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2669
Included in
Administrative Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Law and Politics Commons, President/Executive Department Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons