OME years ago I was reading a final exam in an administrative law class, and a student who had been busily stroking the cases for a half dozen pages or so suddenly interrupted his writing and provided this parenthesis: "(My God, I just actually read part of the APA.Please ignore all I've written so far.)."I've never been sure that reading the APA really did help the poor soul.It often doesn't help me very much.We are gathered here in the pages of the Virginia Law Review neither to bury nor to praise the APA but to take account of it in our search for what each of us would like American administration and its law to be.What emerges from this taking of account by a number of leading scholars and practitioners is a clearer picture than I would have anticipated of two contending visions.One is a vision of an administrative law that facilitates correct, public interest-oriented administrative decisions.The other is a vision of an administrative law that at any given moment approximates the play of political forces among the interests and institutions of the American policymaking process and itself serves as both a prize and a tool in the pursuit of various and competing visions of the good.It is to the place of the APA in these two visions that this article is addressed.I.
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Martin Shapiro (1986) studied this question.