Civil rights enforcement is often imagined as the work of lawyers in court. But over the course of the twentieth century, the administrative state quietly emerged as one of the most significant arenas for civil rights adjudication. In 2023 alone, individuals filed more civil-rights-related complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Department of Education than were filed across the entire federal court system. Yet today, the legal foundations and institutional infrastructure supporting administrative civil rights enforcement are crumbling. This Essay seeks to assess what is at stake in that collapse. It offers an account of what administrative civil rights adjudication does (or once did), the tools it provides, the enforcement possibilities it creates, and its comparative strengths and limitations. This account suggests there may be good reason to return some civil rights enforcement authority to private litigants and the courts. But it also shows that what may be lost in the administrative realm is not easily replaced: the state’s own capacity to recognize, respond to, and remedy inequality. 

* Archer is Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, and President, American Civil Liberties Union. Schottenfeld is Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago School of Law, and Senior Affiliated Research Scholar, the Community Equity Initiative at New York University School of Law. We are grateful to Sherell Farmer, Sam Ozer-Staton, and Sunni Whitmore for their research assistance. We also thank the editors of the Stanford Law Review for their care and attention.