U.S. public law and administration appear to be in the midst of a seismic change: executive power has continued to grow, while congressional authority shrinks or sits in abeyance; the U.S. Supreme Court has significantly augmented presidential control over the federal administrative state, while also establishing the federal judiciary’s ability to check regulatory ambition; values that had once seemed central to American governance, such as the rule of law and anti-corruption, have ever-weaker foundations in law and public practice. Even the most foundational concepts—such as whom the Constitution recognizes as a national citizen—appear to be up for grabs. As we take stock of the U.S. administrative state in this transitional moment, this keynote encourages scholars to give special attention to the role of race.
The opening insight of this keynote is that, despite “racial reckonings” in many other fields, race has not been central to the study of administration, especially among legal scholars. The keynote will then offer several theories as to why: Why has race remained at the margins, despite compelling scholarly efforts to show its salience to the field’s central questions and concerns? Third, this keynote will argue that if we aggregate the scattered work on this topic, coming from different disciplines, we actually do have a good foundation for making bolder claims – about how, when, and why race has mattered to the administration of American law. This scholarship can be broken down into five categories, all offering different insights. The keynote will culminate with a discussion of current efforts to reshape the American administrative state—efforts that are at once willfully inattentive to the historical and present-day significance of non-white racialization and deeply invested in documenting and remedying the perceived disadvantages of whiteness. These efforts confirm that “the problem of the color line,” as W.E.B. DuBois put it, remains at the heart of American law and administration.
To view the programme for the symposium click here.
