Tocqueville's Nightmare

Illuminating - Thomas Meany, Nation Daniel Ernst provides a wonderfully rich and subtly revisionist account of one of the crucial eras in the development of American administrative law. The meat he puts on the bones of apparently arid doctrinal disputes both reveals why administrative law has been and remains a sharply contested battleground in American political development and gives us a brilliant account of what 'American exceptionalism' really entails. --Jerry L. Mashaw, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University In this masterful study, Daniel Ernst shows how judges and lawyers in government and private practice constructed the modern American administrative state in the first decades of the twentieth century, reshaping the protean ideal of the rule of law so that law and government institutions supported each other in overcoming constitutional objections to the nightmare of a monstrous bureaucratic state. His account seamlessly integrates ideas, cases, and politics into a compelling explanation for the constitutional world the New Deal created. --Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School The conventional narrative of the origins of administrative agencies and administrative law in early twentieth-century America has emphasized similarities between American and Western European agencies of the state and has associated the emergence of agencies with the triumph of collectivist ideologies of governance in the United States. Tocqueville's Nightmare demonstrates that the process was far more complicated. Building on recent revisionist work by early twentieth-century legal and constitutional historians, Daniel Ernst has put forth an account of the growth of the American administrative state that reveals the limitations of conventional wisdom and is likely to become authoritative. --G. Edward White, David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law and University Professor, University of Virginia School of Law He has penned a welcome addition to the libraries of those interested in the legal history of the administrative state and in the still-relevant jurisprudential questions surrounding judicial deference to administrative decisions. -Trevor Burrus, Regulation