ABSTRACT
This chapter recasts the research question of the book in terms of the cause of the strong judiciality of the American state and offers a new explanation in which independent commissions play a key role. Although not widely known, the US administrative state is much more judicialized than its counterparts in other industrialized democracies. US agencies are outstanding at making public policies using courtlike procedures autonomously from elected officials. But why is this the case, especially when the judiciality has been criticized for inefficiency and inconsistency in policy outputs? Previous research has emphasized the influence of lawyers and the common-law principle of the supremacy of law internalized by them as its cause. The thesis, however, cannot show why only the United States experienced extensive judicialization and only from the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter offers a complementing explanation that the institutional combination of the common law and separation of powers differentiated the United States from other jurisdictions. It also argues that judicialization was triggered and catalyzed by the institutional development of the “quasi-judicial” independent regulatory commissions from the late nineteenth century. The judicialization was driven by the policy makers’ commitment to procedural fairness in administrative state building.
