The Interstate Commerce Act Creates the First Agency of Its Kind

Regulatory law studies the powers and procedures of administrative agencies that Congress or a legislature creates by statute to oversee a specific activity on an ongoing basis, standing apart from the general legislative and judicial process that created them. The United States Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to oversee railroad rates and practices, the first independent federal regulatory agency of its kind and the model later regulatory bodies across many fields were built on.

Religious organizations operate within a substantial body of secular regulatory law even where their doctrine and worship are constitutionally protected, tax exemption rules, charitable registration, land use and zoning boards, and employment regulation among them, and disputes over where a religious body's own governance ends and regulatory oversight begins are a recurring feature of religious institutional history. The atlas draws on regulatory law wherever a religious organization's documented history includes a dispute with, or a determination by, a secular regulatory body, since that determination is a matter of public administrative record independent of the religious body's own account of the dispute.