The Courts And Social Policy

In recent years, the power of American judges to make social policy has been significantly broadened. The courts have reached into many matters once thought to be beyond the customary scope of judicial decisionmaking: education and employment policy, environmental issues, prison and hospital management, and welfare administration—to name a few. This new judicial activity can be traced to various sources, among them the emergence of public interest law firms and interest groups committed to social change through the courts, and to various changes in the law itself that have made access to the courts easier. The propensity for bringing difficult social questions to the judiciary for resolution is likely to persist. This book is the first comprehensive study of the capacity of courts to make and implement social policy. Donald L. Horowitz, a lawyer and social scientist, traces the imprint of the judicial process on the policies that emerge from it. He focuses on a number of important questions: how issues emerge in litigation, how courts obtain their information, how judges use social science data, how legal solutions to social problems are devised, and what happens to judge-made social policy after decrees leave the court house. After a general analysis of the adjudication process as it bears on social policymaking, the author presents four cases studies of litigation involving urban affairs, educational resources, juvenile courts and delinquency, and policy behavior. In each, the assumption and evidence with which the courts approached their policy problems are matched against data about the social settings from which the cases arose and the effects the decrees had. The concern throughout the book is to relate the policy process to the policy outcome. From his analysis of adjudication and the findings of his case studies the author concludes that the resources of the courts are not adequate to the new challenges confronting them. He suggests

In follow-up studies, dozens of reviews, and even a book of essays evaluating his conclusions, Gerald Rosenberg’s critics—not to mention his supporters—have spent nearly two decades debating the arguments he first put forward in The Hollow Hope. With this substantially expanded second edition of his landmark work, Rosenberg himself steps back into the fray, responding to criticism and adding chapters on the same-sex marriage battle that ask anew whether courts can spur political and social reform. Finding that the answer is still a resounding no, Rosenberg reaffirms his powerful contention that it’s nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. The reason? American courts are ineffective and relatively weak—far from the uniquely powerful sources for change they’re often portrayed as. Rosenberg supports this claim by documenting the direct and secondary effects of key court decisions—particularly Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. He reveals, for example, that Congress, the White House, and a determined civil rights movement did far more than Brown to advance desegregation, while pro-choice activists invested too much in Roe at the expense of political mobilization. Further illuminating these cases, as well as the ongoing fight for same-sex marriage rights, Rosenberg also marshals impressive evidence to overturn the common assumption that even unsuccessful litigation can advance a cause by raising its profile. Directly addressing its critics in a new conclusion, The Hollow Hope, Second Edition promises to reignite for a new generation the national debate it sparked seventeen years ago.

Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution aims to further our understanding of judicial policy impact and the role of the courts in shaping policy change. Bringing together a group of political scientists and legal scholars, this volume delves into a diverse set of policy areas, including health care issues, the regulation of elections, criminal justice policy, minority language education, citizenship, refugee policy, human rights legislation, and Indigenous policy. While much of the public law and judicial politics literatures focus on the impact of the constitution and the judicial role, scholarship on courts that makes policy change its central lens of analysis is surprisingly rare. Multidisciplinary in its approach to examining policy issues, this book focuses on specific cases or policy issues through a wide-ranging set of approaches, including the use of interview data, policy analysis, historical and interpretive analysis, and jurisprudential analysis.

This book is a first-of-its-kind, five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on social and economic rights in each country. The book develops new methodologies for analyzing the sources of and variation in social and economic rights litigation, explains why actors are now turning to the courts to enforce social and economic rights, measures the aggregate impact of litigation in each country, and assesses the relevance of the empirical findings for legal theory. This book argues that courts can advance social and economic rights under the right conditions precisely because they are never fully independent of political pressures.

Using case studies drawn from Latin America, Africa, India and Eastern Europe, this volume examines the role of courts as a channel for social transformation for excluded sectors of society in contemporary democracies. With a focus on social rights litigation in post-authoritarian regimes or in the context of fragile state control, the authors assess the role of judicial processes in altering (or perpetuating) social and economic inequalities and power relations in society. Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise in the fields of law, political theory, and political science, the chapters address theoretical debates and present empirical case studies to examine recent trends in social rights litigation.

In Governing from the Bench, Emmett Macfarlane draws on interviews with current and former justices, law clerks, and other staff members of the court to shed light on the institution’s internal environment and decision-making processes. He explores the complex role of the Supreme Court as an institution; exposes the rules, conventions, and norms that shape and constrain its justices’ behavior; and situates the court in its broader governmental and societal context, as it relates to the elected branches of government, the media, and the public.