Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:38:49.975Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Law's Allure and the Power of Path‐Dependent Legal Ideas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

Gordon Silverstein'sLaw's Allure (2009) advances a two‐part thesis on the power of legal ideas. The first is that legal precedents establish the ideological baselines on which legislative and bureaucratic policies are developed. Silverstein amply demonstrates the validity of this thesis. The second is that by establishing ideological baselines, legal precedents contribute to a version of path dependency (or the idea that early choices determine long‐term developments) that is significantly more constraining than other forms of institutional entrenchment. Put simply, law shackles creativity in politics. This thesis I do not find persuasive, in part because Silverstein offers little evidence for it and in part because a growing body of literature suggests the contrary: the cross‐fertilization of ideas from one field to another—law to politics, for instance—contributes to, rather than retards, creative change. Nonetheless, while its broader ambitions are not satisfied, Law's Allure's narrow thesis—that precedent profoundly shapes policy development—is important and worthy of a major book in itself.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Aminzade, Ronald. 1992. Historical Sociology and Time. Sociological Methods and Research 20:462–67.Google Scholar
Clemens, Elisabeth, and Cook, James M. 1999. Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change. Annual Review of Sociology 25:441–66.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B. 1992. Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law. American Journal of Sociology 97:1531–76.Google Scholar
Farhang, Sean. 2010. The Litigation State: Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Feeley, Malcolm M., and Rubin, Edward L. 1998. Judicial Policymaking and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gillman, Howard. 1993. The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gottschalk, Marie. 2000. The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter A. 1993. Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics 25 (3): 275–96.Google Scholar
Kagan, Robert A. 2003. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Keck, Thomas M. 2004. The Most Activist Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S., and Smith, Rogers M. 2005. Racial Orders in American Political Development. American Political Science Review 99:7592.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. 2000. Path Dependence in Historical Sociology. Theory and Society 29 (4): 507–48.Google Scholar
Melnick, R. Shep. 2010. Silverstein's Allure. Symposium: Law & Social Inquiry 35 (4): 1053–63.Google Scholar
Peters, Shawn Francis. 2000. Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Provine, Doris Marie. 2007. Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Richards, Mark J., and Kritzer, Herbert M. 2002. Jurisprudential Regimes in Supreme Court Decision Making. American Political Science Review 96 (June): 305–20.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Herman. n.d. Down the Wrong Path: Path Dependence, Increasing Returns, and Historical Institutionalism. University of Virginia Department of Political Science. http://people.virginia.edu/~hms2f/Path.pdf (accessed June 16, 2010).Google Scholar
Silverstein, Gordon. 2009. Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. 1995. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 1988. Political Jurisprudence, the “New Institutionalism,” and the Future of Public Law. American Political Science Review 82:89108.Google Scholar
Spaeth, Harold J., and Segal, Jeffrey A. 1999. Majority Rule or Minority Will: Adherence to Precedent on the US Supreme Court. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thelen, Kathleen 2003. How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis. In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Mahoney, James and Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 208–40. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Witte, John. 1985. The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000).Google Scholar
United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995).Google Scholar