Central Issues of American Administrative Law

During the last decade the principal issues of American administrative law have been presented within a framework largely dominated by the recruitment and administration of a military establishment far beyond our normal peacetime complement, by the application of emergency economic controls to that part of our civilian economy normally left to the freedom of the market place, and by the development of security techniques designed to guard against real or fancied dangers of espionage, sabotage and divided loyalties. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that many of the burning issues of the thirties which aroused leaders of the American Bar Association to storm the citadels of bureaucratic power have seemed to pale into relative insignificance beside the sweep of discretionary authority exercised in the name of national emergency. A society which had scarcely freed itself from the controls born of the Second World War before the threatening clouds brought a re-emergence of the familiar pattern of selective service, priorities and allocation, price regulations and wage orders, could derive small comfort from the niceties of the Administrative Procedure Act as bulwarks for the defense of ancient liberties. Nevertheless, emergency controls account for only a part of the machinery of government, and it is still our hopeful assumption that they are temporary phenomena.