How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation, and the Struggle Over Injury Compensation

ISBN-13: 9780199756117 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 272 str.

Jeb Barnes; Thomas F. Burke

Opis

Judicialization, juridification, legalization-whatever terms they use, scholars, commentators and citizens are fascinated by what one book has called "The Global Rise of Judicial Power" and seek to understand its implications for politics and society. In How Policy Shapes Politics, Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke find that the turn to courts, litigation, and legal rights can have powerful political consequences.

Barnes and Burke analyze the field of injury compensation in the United States, in which judicialized policies operate side-by-side with bureaucratized social insurance programs. They conclude that litigation, by dividing social interests into victims and villains, winners and losers, generates a fractious, chaotic politics in which even seeming allies-business and professional groups on one side, injured victims on the other-can become divided amongst themselves. By contrast, social insurance programs that compensate for injury bring social interests together, narrowing the scope of conflict and over time producing a more technocratic politics.

Policy does, in fact, create politics. But only by comparing the political trajectories of different types of policies -- some more court-centered, others less so -- can we understand the consequences of arguably one of the most significant developments in post-World War II government, the increasingly prominent role of courts, litigation, and legal rights in politics.

Recenzje

I know of no book that does a better job explaining how 'adversarial legalism' shapes public policy. Using well-crafted case studies and carefully designed quantitative analysis, Barnes and Burke help us understand the different patterns of politics created by bureaucratic legalism and adversarial legalism. The clarity and depth of their case studies make this a great book for both undergraduate courses and graduate seminars.

O autorze

Jeb Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California. A former litigator with a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and PHd from UC Berkeley, he has written extensively on the intersection between law, politics and public policy in the United States. Tom Burke is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and at the University of California-Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program. He is the co-author with Lief Carter of the 8th edition of Reason in Law (2010) and the author of Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights (2002).