The Political Vulnerability of the American Administrative State

Inspired by Michael Adler’s sociolegal scholarship on administrative justice, this chapter presents a one-country case study in the politics of the modern administrative state. It discusses (1) long-standing features of the U.S. political system that make the American administrative-regulatory state distinctively vulnerable to disruptive political attack; (2) relatively recent political developments in the Republican Party and in the federal courts that have intensified the threat of such attack, e.g., during a possible second Trump presidency; and (3) some significant institutional and political sources of resistance to that threat.