Law has voluntarily abandoned its imperial pretensions, for valid
lawyerly reasons. Although in earlier eras law claimed (rightly or not)
to represent the overarching impartial power that resolved and reconciled
local confl icts over the activities of government, the long arc of
the law has bent steadily toward deference— a freely chosen deference
to the administrative state. Law has abnegated its authority, relegating
itself to the margins of governmental arrangements. Although there
is still a sense in which law is constitutive of the administrative state,
that is so only in a thin sense— the way a picture frame can be constitutive
of the picture yet other wise unimportant, compared to the rich
content at the center.