Authors: Mark C Miller (Editor), Jeb Barnes
ISBN-13: 9781589010253, ISBN-10: 1589010256
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Date Published: August 2004
Edition: 1st Edition
This volume proposes a new way of understanding the policymaking process in the United States by examining the complex interactions among the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Collectively across the chapters a central theme emerges, that the U.S. Constitution has created a policymaking process characterized by ongoing interaction among competing institutions with overlapping responsibilities and different constituencies, one in which no branch plays a single static part. At different times and under various conditions, all governing institutions have a distinct role in making policy, as well as in enforcing and legitimizing it. This concept overthrows the classic theories of the separation of powers and of policymaking and implementation (specifically the principal-agent theory, in which Congress and the presidency are the principals who create laws, and the bureaucracy and the courts are the agents who implement the laws, if they are constitutional).
The book opens by introducing the concept of adversarial legalism, which proposes that the American mindset of frequent legal challenges to legislation by political opponents and special interests creates a policymaking process different from and more complicated than other parliamentary democracies. The chapters then examine in depth the dynamics among the branches, primarily at the national level but also considering state and local policymaking.
Originally conceived of as a textbook, because no book exists that looks at the interplay of all three branches, it should also have significant impact on scholarship about national lawmaking, national politics, and constitutional law.
Intro., conclusion, and Dodd's review all give good summaries.
Foreword | ||
Putting the pieces together : American lawmaking from an interbranch perspective | 3 | |
1 | American courts and the policy dialogue : the role of adversarial legalism | 13 |
2 | Adversarial legalism, the rise of judicial policymaking, and the separation-of-powers doctrine | 35 |
3 | The view of the courts from the hill : a neoinstitutional perspective | 53 |
4 | The view from the president | 72 |
5 | Courts and agencies | 89 |
6 | The supreme court and Congress : reconsidering the relationship | 107 |
7 | The judicial implementation of statutes : three stories about courts and the Americans with disabilities act | 123 |
8 | The city of Boerne : two tales of one city | 140 |
9 | Judicial finality or an ongoing colloquy? | 153 |
10 | Constitutional interpretation from a strategic perspective | 170 |
11 | Is judicial policymaking countermajoritarian? | 189 |
12 | Governance as dialogue | 202 |