Administrative Law in a Global Era : Progress, Deregulatory Change and the Rise of the Administrative Presidency

This article examines how the U.S. public law system adapted to change in the 1980s and how the regulatory structures and discourses of the past were being transformed by the global realities of the present. Tracing the evolution of administrative law during the regulatory eras of the New Deal and the environmental period of the 1960s and '70s as well as the global deregulatory era that began, in earnest, in the 1980s with the Reagan presidency, it illuminates key trends in the interpretation of constitutional and administrative law. In so doing, it provides insights into the process of legal change and the discourses that continue to shape our legal order today. The article first analyzes the legal and political contexts of the New Deal and the environmental eras by focusing on two judicial review doctrines that typify them - the doctrine of deference in the New Deal and the hard look doctrine in the environmental era. It argues that these two approaches to judicial review were products of very different conceptions of progress and change in those periods and explains how courts chose between the two approaches when they reviewed agency deregulation of rules emanating from environmental health and safety concerns. Focusing on the emergence of the doctrine of presidential deference, it then examines agency deregulation and increased executive power as responses to increased global competition and the changing political and economic perspectives it requires. It goes on to analyze how emerging global environmental and developmental issues tempered domestic regulatory and deregulatory discourses based on the demands of global competition