Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Notre Dame Law Review
Abstract
On April 4, 1946, The Potters Herald, a Thursday weekly dedicated to labor and union news, published an editorial warning readers of pending legislation “which may seriously affect labor” despite not containing a “single word about labor” in its text. This legislation would empower “anti-labor judges” to overturn decisions by the National Labor Relations Board. Despite its neutral appearance, it was in reality designed to “kick [labor and the NLRB] in the teeth” and would result in “a field day for the corporation lawyers.”
The complained-of legislation was the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA). From today’s vantage point, the editorial at first seems odd, even histrionic. The APA was unanimously voted into law and has since its enactment operated as a “subconstitution” for the modern administrative state. It has been described as having no particular ideological valence.
But wait a bit. The APA has attracted an increasing amount of left legal scrutiny in recent years. A growing body of evidence suggests that the regulatory process is dominated by business interests. More generally, left legal scholars have trained a critical eye on claims about the law’s ideological neutrality—and that of administrative law in particular. And left efforts to use the administrative state to address interrelated contemporary crises of economic precarity, systemic racial inequality, and environmental destruction must confront the APA. Accordingly, the APA’s history, text, and doctrine is overdue for hard-look review that takes seriously the possibility that—as the editorial urged—its appearance of neutrality deceives. This Article gives the APA a hard look through the lens of movement law—an approach to legal scholarship that is informed by and supportive of left social movements that seek to transform the political, economic, and social status quo.
Last Page
2177
Publication Date
2023
Recommended Citation
Evan D. Bernick, Movement Administrative Procedure, 98 Notre Dame L. Rev 2177 (2023).
Department
College of Law
Suggested Citation
Evan D. Bernick, Movement Administrative Procedure, 98 Notre Dame L. Rev 2177 (2023).
