Widener Law Commonwealth's Podcast

2019 John Gedid Lecture Series The speaker this year was Gillian Metzger of the Columbia Law School. She will present, 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, which was recently published in Harvard Law Review. In the article, she addresses the fact that the national administrative state is under attack today to an extent not witnessed since the New Deal. In particular, constitutional challenges to key features of administrative governance are surfacing in the Supreme Court. Taking a historical perspective, the lecture will argue that the current constitutional challenges are fundamentally misguided. These challenges not only risk the institutional legitimacy of the Court, but also they ignore the extent to which the national administrative state is constitutionally beneficial and even obligatory. Gillian Metzger is the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she is also a faculty co-director of Columbia’s Center for Constitutional Governance.  She writes and teaches in the a