Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International Problem-Solving Court Movement »

James L. Nolan, Jr., is professor of sociology at Williams College. He is the author of "Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement" (Princeton) and "The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century's End".

"This is a first-rate study in every respect. It does so good a job of showing why the recent development of problem-solving courts deserves attention that it simply acts to create an audience where one did not exist before. I was drawn in from the first page. Thoughtful and well-crafted, the book sets a high standard."—Kai Erikson, professor emeritus, Yale University

"Why are American criminal justice innovations so influential even in countries characterized by strong dislike of American cultural imperialism? When legal institutions are imported from abroad is it possible to filter out wider cultural assumptions and practices? In this well-argued and innovative study, James Nolan examines such questions by focusing on how American-style problem-solving courts have been adapted in five other common law jurisdictions. This is a fine and timely illustration of the complexities of cultural borrowing."—David Nelken, Cardiff Law School

"With Reinventing Justice, James Nolan established himself as the leading expert on America's problem-solving court movement. Now, with Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing, he has extended his reach and established himself as one of the world's leading experts on the powerful movement to promote these courts internationally. Cosmopolitan and erudite, this book can be read with enormous profit by students, scholars, and practitioners on at least three continents."—Malcolm M. Feeley, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"James Nolan is one of the leading scholars of problem-solving courts, and to my knowledge this is the only book offering a comprehensive account of the development of these courts around the English-speaking world. Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing is clear and insightful and has a terrific blend of theory and description."—Richard C. Boldt, University of Maryland Law School

"I looked forward to reading this book and was not disappointed. James Nolan has made the subject of problem-solving courts his own. He raises timely and important questions, and writes with an easy, flowing style."—Philip Bean, author of Madness and Crime

Choice

Nolan takes an ethnographic approach to the study of alternative courts to counter the idea that law can simply be transplanted, unchanged, from one environment to another. . . . Nolan does an excellent job of exploring how culture affects legal borrowing, and his work is of considerable value both to scholars of comparative law and to judges, lawyers, and other practitioners who deal with legal change.

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE: Problem Solving and Courts of Law 7
CHAPTER TWO: Law and Culture in Comparative Perspective 24
CHAPTER THREE: Anglo-American Alternatives: England and the United States 43
CHAPTER FOUR: Commonwealth Contrasts: Canada and Australia 76
CHAPTER FIVE: Devolution and Difference: Scotland and Ireland 109
CHAPTER SIX: American Exceptionalism 136
CHAPTER SEVEN: Ambivalent Anti-Americanism 157
CHAPTER EIGHT: Building Confidence, Justifying Justice 179
Notes 197
Selected References 235
Index 243