Varieties of Legal Order

Across the globe, law in all its variety is becoming more central to politics, public policy, and everyday life. For over four decades, Robert A. Kagan has been a leading scholar of the causes and consequences of the march of law that is characteristic of late 20th and early 21st century governance. In this volume, top sociolegal scholars use Kagan’s concepts and methods to examine the politics of litigation and regulation, both in the United States and around the world.

Through studies of civil rights law, tobacco politics, “Eurolegalism,” Russian auto accidents, Australian coal mines, and California prisons, these scholars probe the politics of different forms of law, and the complex path by which “law on the books” shapes social life. Like Kagan’s scholarship, Varieties of Legal Order moves beyond stale debates about litigiousness and overregulation, and invites us to think more imaginatively about how the rise of law and legalism will shape politics and social life in the 21st century.

Thomas F. Burke is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. His research focuses on the place of rights and litigation in public policy, and the ways in which organizations respond to rights laws. His most recent books are How Policy Shapes Politics (2015), coauthored with Jeb Barnes, and the ninth edition of Reason in Law (2016) coauthored with Lief Carter. In a stroke of extraordinary luck, his Ph.D. dissertation, Litigation and its Discontents, was supervised by Robert Kagan. It won the 1996 Edwin S. Corwin Award for best dissertation in public law.

Jeb Barnes is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a former Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research. He is the author of five books and numerous peer-reviewed articles on the intersection of law, politics, and public policy and mixed-methods research strategies, most recently How Policy Shapes Politics (2015), coauthored with Thomas F. Burke, and Finding Pathways: Mixed-Method Research for Studying Causal Mechanisms (2014) coauthored with Nicholas Weller.