The Story of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association of the U.S. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co.: Law, Science and Politics in the Administrative State

What are we to make of the Supreme Court's iconic decision in the State Farm case? At one level State Farm represents a triumphant vindication of reason as administrative law's core value and of independent judicial review of administrative action as the keystone of the rule of law in the administrative state. In State Farm a unanimous Supreme Court blocked the Reagan administration's attempt to rescind the centerpiece of the federal government's ambitious program to make American automobiles safer for their occupants - Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208, the so-called "airbags" or "passive restraints" rule. Although ideologically committed to deregulation, and elected in part on the basis of its promise to provide economic relief for the American automobile industry, the Reagan team at the Department of Transportation (DOT) was instructed by the Supreme Court that politics was not enough. The administration had presented no "adequate basis and explanation for rescinding the passive restraint requirement." DOT was sent back to think again. Through the force of independent judicial review politics and ideology were required to take a backseat to administrative law's demand for reasoned policy judgment. In the great Weberian bureaucratic tradition, the State Farm decision demanded that administrative legitimacy be premised on the transparent demonstration that power is being exercised on the basis of knowledge. Of such interpretations are legal icons made. But this triumphalist account of State Farm may miss much of the action. What if the Reagan administration's rescission feasible only because earlier, and obtuse, rounds of judicial review had delayed promulgation of the passive restraints standard for over a decade? What if the scientific underpinning for the passive restraints rule was uncertain, even problematic? What if the Reagan team's actions were a better approximation of the contemporary preferences of voters for policymaking under the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966's vague statutory mandate than was the imposition of unproven, new, and costly safety requirements on the production of motor vehicles? What if the State Farm decision itself produced, not a new and better rationalization for administrative action, but a creative political compromise that shifted the locus of decision-making from the domain of NHTSA's traffic safety engineers to something like a national referendum conducted in the oblique form of state legislation? What would we think of State Farm then? To get some perspective on these questions we must become time travelers. We must traverse the extraordinary history of motor vehicle safety regulation both before and after the State Farm decision. For State Farm was but a high-visibility legal event in an administrative, political, and legal donnybrook spanning now nearly four decades. Examining that story will take us from the heyday of public support for energetic federal regulation to the increasingly common vision of government as a problem rather than a solution; from the 1960s and early 1970s reformation of administrative law to its counterreformation in the 1980s and beyond. It is a story of high drama and low comedy; of high-visibility actors - figures such as Ralph Nader, Richard Nixon, and Lee Iacocca - and of subterranean bureaucratic warfare; and, as the State Farm decision itself suggests, of constant competition between scientific understandings and political and legal imperatives. The State Farm story thus provides a microcosmic glimpse of the development of the administrative state, and of the shifting visions of administrative law, in late 20th century America.