Standing, the "New Property," and the Costs of Welfare: Dilemmas in American and West German Provider-Administration

Authors

Robert Dugan

Abstract

The overwhelming increase in governmental welfare, subsidy, and licensing programs in the United States' recent history has prompted substantial acadenic controversy and judicial uncertainty over the requisites for standing to challenge the decisions of our provider-administration. Looking beyond our traditional theories, Mr. Dugan examines recent decisions of the West German Federal Administrative Court with respect to mandatory and discretionary governmental benefits which are deemed to create rights in their intended beneficiaries. He argues that the most sound analytical approach to the problem as we now view it would be to apply a "violated right" standard, since injury depends upon violation of a right and, in the public sector as in the private, rights may be defined by their allocatory content. However, recognition of such rights may be self-defeating in the end, since even that approach disregards the fundamental issue of the need for sovereign prerogative over economic controls. The author concludes that creation of rights in our economic system may in fact be inconsistent with the need to maintain that system.

First Page

497

Recommended Citation

Robert Dugan, Standing, the "New Property," and the Costs of Welfare: Dilemmas in American and West German Provider-Administration, 45 Wash. L. Rev. 497 (1970).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol45/iss3/5