Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has advanced a new vision of the administrative state. The two commandments of administrative law in the Roberts Court are to give the President control over the executive branch and to separate government functions into their proper branches. Scholars often describe these two principles as related pieces of a broader effort to shift policymaking toward elected officials and strip power from the civil service. In the standard account, unitary executive theory and separation-of-powers formalism are complementary ideas, which reflect the Court’s skepticism about bureaucratic governance.

This Feature questions that consensus. It argues that there is a basic, inescapable tension at the heart of the Supreme Court’s approach to administrative law. When it comes to administrative courts, the Court’s core intellectual commitments are not complements. The two tenets of its jurisprudence are on a collision course: one requires presidential adjudication, while the other would move agency adjudication to Article III courts. There is no way to reconcile these two views.

Recognizing this conflict reveals deeper problems with both administrative-law doctrine and common critiques of the Supreme Court. Though it is described as anti-administrative, the Roberts Court protects and depends upon a vast system of administrative courts to resolve millions of legal claims outside of Article III. In this respect, the Court favors bureaucracy. Moreover, its defense of the adjudicative state is predicated on a regressive conception of due process, which its critics have largely overlooked.