Law's Allure in American Politics and Policy: What It Is, What It Is Not, and What It Might Yet Be

Abstract

Responding to a set of review essays, the author of Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (Silverstein 2009) argues that politicians and policy entrepreneurs fail to calculate the risks of juridification—the judicialization of policy combined with the legalization of politics itself—which have expanded and accelerated in the United States in recent decades. Paradigmatic case studies (on subjects including poverty, electoral districting, automated budgeting, war powers, abortion laws, and the regulation of tobacco as well as the environment) illustrate the risks of various patterns of juridification and construct an agenda for future research.