Reminiscences on Influential Papers

Reminiscences on Parallel evaluation of multi-join queries. (Proc. SIGMOD Conf. 1995), Annita Wilschut, Jan Flokstra, Peter M.G. Apers

Mr. Try-It Goes to Washington: Law and Policy at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration

In December 1933, Jerome Frank, the general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration but better for writing Law and the Modern Mind (1930), a sensational attack on legal formalism, told an audience at the Association of American Law Schools a parable about two lawyers in the New Deal, each forced to interpret same, ambiguous statutory language. The first lawyer, “Mr. Absolute,” reasoned from the text and canons of statutory interpretation without regard for the desirability of the outcome. “Mr. Try-It,” in contrast, began with the outcome he thought desirable. He then said to himself, “The administration is for it, and justifiably so. It is obviously in line with the general intention of Congress as shown by legislative history. The statute is ambiguous. Let us work out an argument, if possible, so to construe the statute as to validate this important program.” Although the memoranda the two produced were interchangeable, Mr. Try-It wrote his in a fifth the time. Although the professors in attendance might have nodded approvingly, Frank’s speech, later printed in the Congressional Record, was startlingly impolitic in its muddying of a distinction between law and policy that he insisted upon when battling administrators over the terms of marketing agreements for agricultural commodities. How Frank actually drew the line owed less to his legal realist jurisprudence that the persuasiveness of his two associate general counsels, the radicals Lee Pressman and Alger Hiss

The Shallow State: The Federal Communications Commission and the New Deal

American lawyers and law professors commonly turn to the New Deal for insights into the law and politics of today’s administrative state. Usually, they have looked to agencies created in the 1930s that became the foundation of the postwar political order. Some have celebrated these agencies; others have deplored them as the core of an elitist, antidemocratic Deep State. This article takes a different tack by studying the Federal Communications Commission, an agency created before the New Deal. For most of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two presidential terms, the FCC languished within the “Shallow State,” bossed about by patronage-seeking politicians, network lobbyists, and the radio bar. When Roosevelt finally let a network of lawyers in his administration try to clean up the agency, their success or failure turned on whether it could hire the kind of young, smart, hard-working lawyers who had at other agencies proven themselves to be the “shock troops of the New Deal.” Only after James Lawrence Fly, formerly general counsel of the Tennessee Valley Authority, became chairman and hired lawyers like himself did the FCC set sail. It cleaned up its licensing of radio stations and addressed monopoly power in the industry without becoming the tool of an authoritarian president or exceeding its legislative and political mandates

The Campaign to Arrest Ed Shann’s Influence in Western Australia

Shann towered over the discipline of economics in the state of Western Australia in the first third of the twentieth century. He was the foundation professor in history and economics from 1913 to 1931 and inaugural professor of economics from 1931 to 1934 at the University of Western Australia (UWA); he set the curriculum for the subjects that constituted the economics major that was offered at UWA over this period and ensured that it had a market-driven, policy-oriented and historical flavour; he trained a generation of bright young men and women—such as John La Nauze, Nugget Coombs, Merab Harris, Paul Hasluck, Arthur Tange and Alexander Reid—who drew upon his teachings (even when they disagreed with certain elements of it) to guide their actions as servants of the public; he exploited his contacts in the commercial and professional world of Perth to draw men of intellect, but not formal economic training, into the newly established local branch of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand in 1925; he established close contacts with local men of finance, including Alfred Davidson of the Bank of New South Wales, in a way that eventually allowed him (and his students!) to provide policy advice at a national level; and he used his power as an administrator, at one time acting as the Vice Chancellor of the university, to establish a faculty of law and a diploma in journalism, both of which thereafter had close associations with the economics discipline at UWA. Shann, in short, created the discipline of economics in Western Australia in his own image. Unfortunately, however, a number of powerful identities in Perth resented the free-market commentaries that Shann dispensed in the public domain and before his students, and hence orchestrated a public campaign to arrest his influence. In this paper I provide an account of Shann’s influence in Western Australia from 1913 to 1934 and trace the campaign waged against him (and economics) which eventually induced him to leave this state