Levine on Beyond "Big Government": Toward New Legal Histories of the New Deal Order's End @paulesabin @michlawreview

Gabriel L. Levine, Princeton University Department of Politics, is publishing Beyond 'Big Government': Towards New Legal Histories of the New Deal Order's End in the Michigan Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This essay reviews Professor Paul Sabin's recent book, Public Citizens, and offers the beginnings of an alternative legal history of the New Deal order's end. Sabin argues that liberal lawyers—and not just conservative activists—helped unmake the New Deal order from within. Through their vociferous criticisms of federal agencies, activists led by Ralph Nader undermined citizens' confidence that government could serve the “public interest.” Public Citizens is a major accomplishment; it deserves a wide audience among scholars of legal history, administrative law, and environmental law. However, Sabin overstates liberal complicity in unmaking “big government.” In the process, he overlooks much of what made public-interest liberalism both intellectually distinctive and politically vulnerable. Building upon Sabin’s insights, I sketch a new historical account of public-interest liberalism—one that considers not just how much government public-interest liberals wanted, but also what kind. I focus here on public-interest liberals' core project: environmental law. Public-interest liberals, I argue, were centrally committed to two distinct but related ideas: regulation in public policy and legalism in political morality. This combination was generative, but proved short-lived, as liberals were unable to muster a convincing response when the courts turned against them. Environmental law today endures, but as the remnants of an exhausted ideological synthesis. Transcending this synthesis is essential in today's struggle for a livable climate.

Download the book review from SSRN at the link.