Marshall reviews Farhang, "The Litigation State"

The Law & Politics Book Review has released a review of The Litigation State: Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the United States (Princeton University Press), by political scientist Sean Farhang.

Reviewer Anna-Maria Marshall (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) introduces the book as follows:

In his fascinating book, Sean Farhang asks a big question – what is the role of the civil litigation system in the American regulatory state? Politicians from both ends of the ideological spectrum frequently bemoan the fact that the United States is a litigious society, but in those debates, they rarely admit that private lawsuits are sometimes the only way for people to claim the rights granted to them by law. Other political systems relegate law enforcement primarily to command and control agencies, yet American skepticism about bureaucracy and regulation renders such enforcement regimes politically controversial. Thus, in many realms of regulation, Congress makes ordinary citizens “private attorneys general,” authorizing them to implement the law when and where they see fit. Farhang’s analysis seeks to explain the institutional context that gives rise to these enforcement mechanisms.

Read on here.

Related Posts :

Regulation

• Legal History in the News: The Importance of Wickard

Scholarship -- Books

• Colucci on McMahon on Nixon's Court
• Green, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution
• Wood Reviews White's Law in American History
• Ted White Q&A: Law in American History in the Scholarly Market
• Hibbitts reviews Hawke, Elite Competition and Written Law in Ancient Greece
• "Flagrant Conduct," "Cosmic Constitutional Theory," and More: This Week in the Book Pages
• New Release: Ghachem, "The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution"
• McDougall's "Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne"
• Mayeri on Hartog, "Someday All This Will Be Yours"