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John F Duffy`
"There is no such thing as a common law of judicial review in the federal courts. "-Felix Frankfurter'
Justice Frankfurter wrote those words in 1944. They were part of a dissenting view to the reality of judge-made or common law then governing judicial review of federal administrative agencies. Two years later, in 1946, Congress enacted the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)2, which was designed to govern both internal agency procedure and judicial review3 and was thought to be "complete enough to cover the whole field. "4 But the enactment of the APA did little to displace the domination of common law in the field. If anything, the growth of purely judge-made law accelerated. Decades after the enactment of the APA, Professor Kenneth Culp Davis could accurately note: "Perhaps about nine-tenths of American administrative law is judge-made law, and the other tenth is statutory . . . . Most of it is common law in every sense, that is, it is law made by judges in absence of relevant constitutional or statutory provision This common-law tradition had a particularly strong hold on the doctrine governing judicial review of administrative action, an area that Professor Louis Jaffe described in 1965 (again, quite accurately) as encompassing "a whole congeries of judicial theories and practices"-a "body of power and doctrine that we would call . . . the common law of review, and which is a significant part of the `administrative law' of the jurisdiction. "6
Now, finally, this administrative common law of judicial review is beginning to abate; it is being replaced, albeit slowly, by doctrine grounded in the judicial review provisions of the APA and other statutes. This Article explains why a common law of judicial review ever existed in the first place, why it continued to grow after the enactment of the APA, why much of it is now meeting its demise, and why this change is for the best. It is a tale not only of the continuing development of administrative law doctrine, but also of the legacy of some of the oldest statutes in the Republic, of the crucible of New Deal politics that both gave birth to the APA and also nearly killed it in its infancy, and, perhaps most...