New from Oxford University Press:
No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment (Jan. 2015), by Sarah Staszak (Harvard University/City College of New York-CUNY). A description from the Press:
We are now more than half a century removed from height of the rights
revolution, a time when the federal government significantly increased
legal protection for disadvantaged individuals and groups, leading in
the process to a dramatic expansion in access to courts and judicial
authority to oversee these protections. Yet while the majority of the
landmark laws and legal precedents expanding access to justice remain
intact, less than two percent of civil cases are decided by a trial
today. What explains this phenomenon, and why it is so difficult to get
one's day in court?
No Day in Court examines the
sustained efforts of political and legal actors to scale back access to
the courts in the decades since it was expanded, largely in the service
of the rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Since that time, for
political, ideological, and practical reasons, a multifaceted group of
actors have attempted to diminish the role that courts play in American
politics. Although the conventional narrative of backlash focuses on an
increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Congress, and activists aiming
to constrain the developments of the Civil Rights era, there is another
very important element to this story, in which access to the courts for
rights claims has been constricted by efforts that target the "rules of
the game:" the institutional and legal procedures that govern what
constitutes a valid legal case, who can be sued, how a case is
adjudicated, and what remedies are available through courts. These more
hidden, procedural changes are pursued by far more than just
conservatives, and they often go overlooked. No Day in Court explores the politics of these strategies and the effect that they have today for access to justice in the U.S.
A few blurbs:
"One of the most important stories about America's civil rights
revolution has been the story of retrenchment-how rights guarantees have
been systematically limited by procedural reforms that restrict
judicial remedies. Sarah Staszak shows how both supporters and opponents
of the rights revolution have been complicit in rationing and blocking
access to the courts. If you want to understand what happened to the
promise of civil rights in this country, read this book." -- Jack M.
Balkin, Yale Law School
"For the less advantaged,
DeTocqueville's observation that in America every political issue
becomes a judicial one may no longer be true. In a work of admirable
breadth, Sarah Staszak shows that a congeries of organizations and
movements have collaborated to reduce access to courts. After time well
spent with Staszak's cogent argument, readers will never view
alternative dispute resolution, administrative rulings, state sovereign
immunity and attorney's fees quite the same way." -- Daniel Carpenter,
Harvard University
More information is available
here.
