This article uses the case of the economist John Malcolm Blair as a vehicle for examining the durability of the institutional tradition in US economic policy making. Over a multidecade federal government career, Blair played an important role in focusing policy debate on institutionalist concerns like economic structure and corporate power even through the heyday of the Keynesian Revolution. Indeed, Blair stood as representative of an overlooked postwar policy-intellectual current that strove to anchor the study of macroeconomic issues like inflation and unemployment upon solid microfoundations: what I call Institutional Keynesianism. A primary influence behind such policy developments as the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 and the wage–price guideposts implemented by the Kennedy administration, Blair’s work sheds light on the meaningful yet often neglected links between different schools of economic thought and policy domains.

Prior to the Civil War, the US and state governments required the modern licensing of only three occupations, doctors, lawyers, and ship pilots. Most other references to licensing in the 15,000 surveyed antebellum statutes referred to licensing in general terms. Those that referred to the “licensing” of occupations clearly referenced a type of tax or regulation of occupations thought sinful or diplomatically sensitive, like Indian trading and privateering. In other words, the presumption of occupational freedom that developed in medieval and early modern Britain transferred to the colonies and the United States. Only with the rise of Progressivism did modern occupational licensing become common, thus adding weight to economic critiques of the current system.

This article examines a 40-year policy history of efforts to redress survivors of egregious violations, such as torture, massacres, and genocides. Using oral history interviews and document analysis, it first focused on the ideas and creative advocacy that undergirded a burgeoning redress movement. By juxtaposing classic ideas with a relatively obscure statute (the Alien Tort Statute or ATS) and modern strategies, advocates won an improbable court case. Their case inspired Congress to introduce, debate, and pass the Torture Victim Protection Act, explicitly to support, affirm, and expand the ATS and the idea of universal jurisdiction, locally and globally. After advocates further developed these ideas with new court cases and NGOs, the Supreme Court began whittling the policies away, despite congressional intent, prioritizing the ideas that Congress had rejected, until the Court stripped the ATS of its universal jurisdiction power. This human rights retrenchment in the United States drove the advocates to seek new bases for human rights justice and to develop their ideas abroad where legal actions have succeeded in advancing some redress. In expounding this history, the article sheds light on four phenomena: the power and limitations of aspirational and practical ideas in constructing new pathways to justice; the role of creative advocacy to frame and amalgamate ideas toward developing paradigm-shifting policy and law; the flow and interactions between government branches and civil society with the ideas and policies, including how the courts initially led in advancing human rights redress then later reversed and truncated the pathway counter to Congressional intent.

There has been limited research on African policy instruments’ historical and institutional nature in health policy literature. However, in the field of health systems research, there are many examples that show the permanent use of financing instruments inspired by liberal (pro-market) ideas such as user fees, performance bonuses, or private practice of medicine in Africa. Through an analysis of archives (1840–1960), this article shows the presence of these instruments in the health system during the French colonial period in Senegal. Thus, this study shows that these financing policy instruments’ institutional presence and longevity are part of a liberal approach that predates international organizations’ contemporary (and liberal) promotion. This study uses a historical and institutionalist approach to understand the context, actors, and underlying factors that allowed for this historical continuity, resulting in the permanence of these instruments.