News Release
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Contact:
Daniel B. Rodriguez, Dean and Professor of Law 619.260.4527
George Decker, Director of Publications 619.260.4097
University of San Diego School of Law Mourns
Passing of Scholar Kenneth Culp Davis
Kenneth Culp Davis, 94; Preeminent Administrative Law Scholar
Sep. 29, 2003, San Diego-Kenneth Culp Davis, a legal scholar generally recognized as the creator of the field of administrative law, died on August 30, 2003 in San Diego. He was 94.
Prior to Davis's publishing his text Administrative Law in 1951 and then his multi-volume treatise on the subject in 1958, administrative law as such did not exist. Its subject matter was instead scattered across several other legal fields, such as evidence law, procedural law, and constitutional law. As Davis' long time friend, colleague, and fellow administrative law scholar Carl Auerbach puts it: "Some lawyers practicing before government agencies doubted that there was a unified body of law that could be described as administrative law. Ken's treatise created the field." Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University and the current author of Davis's administrative law treatise, echoes Auerbach and calls Davis "the father of administrative law." Pierce says that Davis's 1951 text "brought the field together, integrating its parts into a coherent whole and explaining the central role of administrative law in modern government."
To this day, Davis's treatise is the bible for the many thousands of lawyers who practice before administrative agencies and judges who review agency decisions. As Bill Funk, Chair of the Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association puts it, "Davis's shadow falls over virtually all that administrative lawyers do. A quick online search reveals over 4500 judicial citations to his treatise. To say he was a giant in his field is like saying Mt. Everest is a big mountain."
Beyond establishing and organizing the field of administrative law as a whole, Davis made many notable contributions to specific areas of law. Davis was one of the founding fathers of the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal statute that is the foundational law governing the relation between the federal administrative agencies and those individuals and businesses they affect.
Another area in which he was particularly influential was that of the law concerning when government must hold trials or trial-like hearings in order to establish the existence of certain facts, and when government may assume a fact to exist and act on the basis of that assumption without proving its existence in a trial or trial-like hearing. He coined the terms "adjudicative facts" and "legislative facts" to refer respectively to those two types of facts.
Yet another topic that captured Davis's attention was the vast amount of policy discretion in the hands of administrative officials. In his quite influential monograph Discretionary Justice, published in 1969, he argued passionately for controlling officials through highly constraining legal rules rather than through vague standards that permitted them to make policy choices.
Davis was born in 1908 in Leeton, Missouri. He received his undergraduate degree from Whitman College and his law degree from Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1934. After a few years of practicing law in both private practice and with the federal government, he became a law professor. He taught law at the University of West Virginia, the University of Texas, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago, where he held a chaired professorship until 1976. In that year, he joined the faculty of the University of San Diego, where he taught until 1994, retiring from law teaching at the age of 86.
During Davis's years at the University of San Diego, he was voted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences (in 1979), and he published the second edition of his administrative law treatise (in 1984). He also attracted to the San Diego law faculty such major legal academics as Auerbach (the former dean at Minnesota), Nathaniel Nathanson, an administrative law teacher at Northwestern, and Willard Wirtz, the Secretary of Labor under President John F. Kennedy and a law professor at Northwestern.
Davis was an indefatigable worker who well into his eighties was writing and keeping abreast of the numerous developments in his vast field. He was also fiercely competitive and physically fit, frequently challenging and defeating much younger men at squash and racquetball.
Davis is survived by his wife, Inger; his two children, Malcolm Davis of Freeland, Washington, and Margaret Davis Galanti of Naples, Florida; four grandchildren; and three great grandchildren.
|
