Q1. What are the historical antecedents to the Administrative Procedures Act?
Holistically, the APA is an Act meant to bolster the administration of justice through impartial administrative procedure. The antecedents to the Administrative Procedures Act trace their roots to 1936 when the late President Roosevelt created the President’s Committee on Administrative Management (Parker, 1951). The committee submitted a plethora of reports and studies that were subsequently transmitted by the President to Congress in 1937. However, an essential antecedent that preceded the reports and studies was the total separation of the legislative from the judicial responsibilities in every agency that exercised both. In 1938, the Senate Judiciary committee held hearings on a proposal pertaining to the establishment of an administrative court. 1939 realized the Walter-Logan bill that attempted to access and control the administrative process at its core. According to Parker (1951), following the tentative revisions to the bill in 1945, the bill was signed by the president on 11 th September 1946 after unanimous decision by the House of Senate to amend the bill. As such, APA as we know it was brought to existence.
Q2. What were the "old-fashioned turf protections" argued in Metzger's article?
The old-fashioned turf protections are in reference to the gap that exists between public administration and administrative law. One such turf protection is ensuring a court-centric focus by administrative law meant to keep the courts aloof of the inner dealings of how agencies are run. Another turf protection is the definition of administrative law with reference to judicial controls (Metzger, 2015). This protection was subsequently preceded by the separation of administration from law giving room for the coexistence of two different schools. These included public administration and administrative law as separate fields of inquiry.
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Q3. Do they still exist today?
Indeed, despite the consorted efforts by individuals such as Frank Goodnow, Marshall Dimock and Ernst Freund to converge public administration and administrative law, the turf protections still maintain the rift between the two concepts, even widening it. As Metzger (2015) notes, the divergence between the two concepts continues to grow today with more protections being enforced.
Q4. Should administrative law and public administration be more closely linked?
Dolan (1984) weighs in on the topic addressing a fundamental conundrum; whether the study of administrative law should be undertaken as a public administration course with emphasis on how public officials act and react or whether administrative should law be taught as a procedure course focusing on the rules of administrative procedure preceding substantive law in fundamentality. In general, this inquiry by the author is representative of the current quagmire involving the two fields. Metzger (2015) asserts that the divide is perplexing based on the rationale that administrative law is out of touch with the actual administrative practice than ever before. Administrative law has drifted further from the salient aspects of how agencies operate. To this end, it is of the highest opinion that the two should be more closely linked because the inattention to public administration by administrative law will result in risks of thwarting development of good administrative practices thereby incentivizing the adoption of detrimental ones.
References
Dolan, M. W. (1984). Administrative Law and Public Administration. Wiley, 44 (1), 86-89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/975668
Metzger, G. E. (2015). Administrative law, public administration, and the administrative conference of the United States. Geo. Wash. L. Rev. , 83 (4/5) 1517. https://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/83-Geo-Wash-L-Rev-1517.pdf
Parker, R. (1951). The Administrative Procedure Act: A Study in Overestimation. The Yale Law Journal , 60 (4), 581-599. https://www.jstor.org/stable/793705
