The Executive Power of the Federal Courts

By Adam Crews. 

Centuries after the Constitution divided the federal government’s great powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—differentiating these powers, and identifying the relationships between them, remains “one of the most intractable puzzles in constitutional law.” This puzzle poses a particular challenge for the administrative state. To take one notable example, jurists and scholars have struggled for decades to explain how the modern agency fits within the constitutional scheme. But agencies are not the only important players. Much of administrative law, after all, is the body of principles and rules that govern judicial review of executive action. And in recent years, jurists and scholars have highlighted the many ways in which cornerstones of this review are arguably incompatible with Article III’s limits on the judicial power. Full Article