Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2011 Article III, Agency Adjudication, and the Origins of the Appellate Review Model of Administrative Law Thomas W. Merrill Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Administrative Law Commons Recommended Citation Thomas W. Merrill, Article III, Agency Adjudication, and the Origins of the Appellate Review Model of Administrative Law, 111 COLUM. L. REV. 939 (2011). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/140 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW VOL. 111 JUNE 2011 NO. 5 ARTICLE ARTICLE III, AGENCY ADJUDICATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE APPELLATE REVIEW MODEL OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW Thomas W. Merrill* ABSTRACT American administrativelaw is grounded in a conception of the rela- tionship between reviewing courts and agencies modeled on the relationship between appeals courts and trial courts in civil litigation. This appellate review model was not an inevitablefoundation of administrativelaw, but it has had far-reaching consequences, and its origins are poorly understood. This Article details how the appellate review model emerged after 1906 as an improvised response by the U.S. Supreme Court to a political crisis brought on by aggressive judicial review of decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Once the jeny-built model was in place, Congress signaled its approval, and an academic-John Dickinson-wrote a persuasive book ex- tolling its virtues.