The Judicial Response to the Administrative State

This chapter describes the way a requirement of contestation was introduced into definitions of federal judicial power in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The case-or-controversy requirement arose as a tool with which federal courts could refrain from lending support to the investigatory and regulatory initiatives of the growing administrative state. Justice Stephen Field played a central role in the introduction of the contestation construct, and it took hold at the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, as progressive Justices came to embrace contestation as an essential limit on the judicial role in constitutional litigation.