The functioning of the U.S. government is a bit messier than Americans would like to think. The general understanding of policymaking has Congress making the laws, executive agencies implementing them, and the courts applying the laws as written—as long as those laws are constitutional. Making Policy, Making Law fundamentally challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that no dominant institution—or even a roughly consistent pattern of relationships—exists among the various play...

In the first edition of this groundbreaking book, Robert Kagan explained why America is much more adversarial—likely to rely on legal threats and lawsuits—than other economically advanced countries, with more prescriptive laws, more costly adjudications, and more severe penalties. This updated edition also addresses the rise of the conservative legal movement and anti-statism in the Republican party, which have put in sharp relief the virtues of adversarial legalism in its ability to empow...

Year by year, law seems to penetrate ever larger realms of social, political, and economic life, generating both praise and blame. Nonet and Selznick's Law and Society in Transition explains in accessible language the primary forms of law as a social, political, and normative phenomenon. They illustrate with great clarity the fundamental difference between repressive law, riddled with raw conflict and the accommodation of special interests, and responsive law, the reasoned effort to realiz...

In the early twenty-first century, courts have become versatile actors in the governance of many constitutional democracies, and judges play a variety of roles in politics and policy making. Assembling papers penned by academic specialists on high courts around the world, and presented during a year-long Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, this volume maps the roles in governance that courts are undertaking and the ways they have co...

In Judging Democracy, Christopher Manfredi and Mark Rush challenge assertions that the Canadian and American Supreme Courts have taken radically different approaches to constitutional interpretation regarding general and democratic rights. Three case studies compare Canadian and American law concerning prisoners' voting rights, the scope and definition of voting rights, and campaign spending. These examples demonstrate that the two Supreme Courts have engaged in essentially the sa...

**The definitive reckoning with Affirmative Action, one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race and the law.”—The Washington Post“A clear-eyed take on America’s battle over affirmative action and diversity.... [Kennedy] goes straight at the issue with fearlessness and a certain cheekiness.” —Los Angeles Times**“Compelling.... Powerful.” —Wall Street Journal

This collection of original essays by leading scholars and advocates offers the first international examination of the nature, causes, and effects of laws regulating voting by people with criminal convictions. In deciding whether prisoners shall retain the right to vote, a country faces vital questions about democratic self-definition and constitutional values - and, increasingly, about the scope of judicial power. Yet in the rich and growing literature on comparative constitutionalism, re...

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them.The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues t...

"An extremely well-researched, intellectual approach to the problem of relativism and its effect on education, public policy, and our everyday lives." --Youthworker

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice. It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. The starting point for her critique is the experience and concerns of the new social movements about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor--that were created by marginal a...

There are three general models of Supreme Court decision making: the legal model, the attitudinal model and the strategic model. But each is somewhat incomplete. This book advances an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that incorporates variables from each of the three models. In examining the modern Supreme Court, since Brown v. Board of Education, the book argues that decisions are a function of the sincere preferences of the justices, the nature of precedent, and the deve...

Ronald Dworkin is widely accepted as the most important and most controversial Anglo-American jurist of the past forty years. And this same-named volume on his work has become a minor classic in the field, offering the most complete analysis and integration of Dworkin's work to date. This third edition offers a substantial revision of earlier texts and, most importantly, incorporates discussion of Dworkin's recent masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs.Accessibly written for a w...