Walking through the FDR Library and Museum, you enter a room devoted to “A New Deal.” Around the room, atop pillars of scaffolding, signs declare “Social Security” or “Labor Reform.” Walking under and through the edifice under construction, we read about the social architecture of the country that every visitor today has always known.

I shared this virtual tour of the exhibit with my Administrative Law class yesterday as we began three weeks of discussion of separation of powers. I wanted to convey the power of that exhibit, a structural representation of the fact that social programs do not simply happen; they were built. I told them about Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member in U.S. history, the architect behind that edifice.

This architecture matters not as history but as example. Because today, we stand on the cusp (or maybe in the middle) of another revolution in our social architecture. We’ve talked frequently this semester about the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Supreme Court appears likely to overrule or at least greatly limit the seminal case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Another pending case, U.S. v. Jarkesy, challenges executive agency power to adjudicate certain cases, claiming violation of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Jarkesy continues a challenge to agency power from recent terms in cases like U.S. v. Arthrex and Lucia v. SEC.

Today, another set of architects works busily behind the scenes. Their work surfaces in the public under boring-sounding terms like “multilevel protection from removal” and “deference to agency expertise.” But the architects seek nothing less bold than a dismantling of the scaffolding through which the FDR Library visitor walks, through which we all walk every day in the United States.

As a teacher, I don’t really care whether my students agree or disagree with the new architecture. But I want passionately for them to feel the drama, the stakes of the project we’re engaged in here. I want them to see themselves as architects too — with a choice in the kind of edifice they want to help construct.

I asked the students (because I’ve seen the literature) whether any of them came to law school with a desire to make a difference and spent their first year feeling like they were taught only to absorb and regurgitate laws that had already been made. Several nodded yes. Okay, I said, there’s a certain amount of broccoli that has to be eaten in the first year — you have to know what the laws are before you can change them.

Students take Administrative Law in their second year. Now they have a choice. Now, armed with the “ninja toolkit” they’ve built this semester, they have the equipment to design and build the society they want to see, whatever their vision.