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 an array of 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 in which they have come to matter in the political life of their nations. It offers empirically rich accounts of dramatic judicial actions in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, exploring the political conditions and judicial strategies that have fostered those assertions of power, and evaluating when and how courts' performance of new roles has been politically consequential. By focusing on the content and consequences of judicial power, the book advances a new agenda for the comparative study of courts.

Product Description: As a result of a lifetime of incomparably wide-ranging investigations, Aaron Wildavsky concluded that politics in the United States and elsewhere was a patterned activity, exhibiting recurring regularities. Political values, beliefs, and institutions were neither endlessly varied, nor haphazardly organized...read more

How much does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? This pathbreaking, in-depth study of fourteen pulp manufacturing mills in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand reveals that steadily tightening regulatory standards have been crucial for raising environmental performance. But while all firms have shown improvement, some have improved more than others, many going substantially beyond compliance. What explains the variation in compliance? It's not necessarily the differences in regulation in each country. Rather, variation is accounted for by the complex interaction between tightening regulations and a social license to operate (especially pressures from community and environmental activists), economic constraints, and differences in corporate environmental management style. Shades of Green provides the most extensive and systematic empirical study to date of why firms achieve the levels of environmental performance that they do. (view table of contents)

American methods of policy implementation and dispute resolution are more adversarial and legalistic when compared with the systems of other economically advanced countries. Americans more often rely on legal threats and lawsuits. American laws are generally more complicated and prescriptive, adjudication more costly, and penalties more severe. In a thoughtful and cogently argued book, Robert Kagan examines the origins and consequences of this system of "adversarial legalism." Kagan describes the roots of adversarial legalism and the deep connections it has with American political institutions and values. He investigates its social costs as well as the extent to which lawyers perpetuate it. Ranging widely across many legal fields, including criminal law, environmental regulations, tort law, and social insurance programs, he provides comparisons with the legal and regulatory systems of western Europe, Canada, and Japan that point to possible alternatives to the American methods. Kagan notes that while adversarial legalism has many virtues, its costs and unpredictability often alienate citizens from the law and frustrate the quest for justice. This insightful study deepens our understanding of law and its relationship to politics in America and raises valuable questions about the future of the American legal system.

Product Description: This book describes a century of tremendous legal change, of inspiring legal developments, and profound failures. The twentieth century took the United States from the Progressive Era's optimism about law and social engineering to current concerns about a hyperlegalistic society, from philosophical idealism to the implementation of democracy, the rule of law, and the idea of human rights throughout the world...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: What is regulation? Under what circumstances is it needed? What forms should it take? Such questions are especially relevant at a time in United States history when governmental involvement in decisions formerly left to individuals and business firms evokes concern on all sides of the political spectrum...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Regulatory Encounters reports on a path-breaking study of how government regulation of business in the United States differs in practice from regulation in other economically advanced democracies. In each of ten in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume compare a particular multinational corporation's experience with parallel regulatory regimes in the United States and in Japan, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and the European Union, noting precisely which regulatory precautions were actually implemented in each country...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Social science has been an important influence on legal thought since the legal realists of the1930s began to argue that laws should be socially workable as well as legally valid. With the expansion of legal rights in the 1960s, the law and social science were bound together by an optimistic belief that legal interventions, if fully informed by social science, could become an effective instrument of social improvement...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Regulatory Justice is based on a case study of two closely linked federal agencies—the Cost of Living Council (CLC) and the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP)—which administered a nationwide wage-price freeze in 1971.