On Law, Politics, and Judicialization

Abstract

Across the globe, the domain of the litigator and the judge has radically expanded, making it increasingly difficult for those who study comparative and international politics, public policy, and regulation, or the evolution of new modes of governance to avoid encountering a great deal of law and courts. In this book, two leading political scientists present a compilation of their research in 11 papers (some old, some new) that focus on how to build and test a social science and politics of law, courts, and judging. Chapters 1–5 each contain two pieces, one by each author addressing a common topic. Each pair of papers is preceded by co-authored introductions that explain how the materials presented relate to the more general purpose of developing a broad-gauge social science research agenda on law and courts, discuss the original motivations for writing the papers, and trace important (but perhaps not always obvious) connections between the two offerings. Chapter 6 consists of a co-authored piece. The opening chapter features Shapiro’s classic ‘Political Jurisprudence’, and Stone Sweet’s ‘Judicialization and the Construction of Governance’, pieces that critically redefined research agendas on the politics of law and judging. Subsequent chapters take up diverse themes: the strategic contexts of litigation and judging; the discursive foundations of judicial power; the social logic of precedent and appeal; the networking of legal elites; the law-making dynamics of rights adjudication; the success and diffusion of constitutional review; the reciprocal impact of courts and legislatures; the globalization of private law; methods, hypothesis-testing, and prediction in comparative law; and the sources and consequences of the creeping ‘judicialization of politics’ around the world. Chosen empirical settings include the United States, the GATT–WTO, France and Germany, Imperial China and Islam, the European Union, and the transnational world of the Lex Mercatoria.