Many of the world’s most pressing issues lay at the intersection of law and public administration. However, many have long lamented the relatively weak and atomized state of law and public administration scholarship. In this article, we use bibliometric and content analyses to systematically assess the last 20 years of literature, exploring the extent to which law and public administration have developed as a coherent paradigm. In short, we provide a contemporary assessment of the past assertion that “public administration has largely abandoned or forgotten its roots in public law—in the Constitution, statutes, and case law.” While we conclude that little changed in the last two decades, we offer some insights on the theoretical integration of law and public administration identifying strengths, weaknesses, and future avenues to advance paradigm building. Many of these recommendations necessitate better cross- and inner-field integration of voices and ideas.

This article challenges some of the accepted wisdom about the relationship between courts and public institutions. The authors raise a reasonable doubt concerning whether judges as a whole are refusing to defer to administrator's expertise and have lost their "cloak of neutrality." Moreover, there is evidence to conclude that judges, as a whole, are shying away from the detailed "command-and-control" approaches of the past where courts determined remedial norms, formulated comprehensive and inflexible decrees, and then occupied a substantial directive role in their implementation. At the same time, the authors find continued salience in O'Leary and Straussman's concern regarding untested conclusions made largely in absence of empirical evidence concerning the impact of courts on public management. Implications for the education of public administration scholars and practitioners are offered.

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