I analyze how people write and revise local language policies, through text histories of four policies in Frederick County, Anne Arundel County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County in the state of Maryland. Three of the four policies follow the same general template, and that template emerged out of an even earlier partnership between the organization ProEnglish and the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. This state of affairs complicates previous accounts of local language policies, which tend to treat the phenomenon as either a purely grassroots phenomenon or as a case of astroturfing. Instead, all language policymakers have agency and are strategic about their writing processes. I argue that three writing strategies are particularly important: ghostwriting, making conscious choices about genre, and working with templates. While language policies are sometimes treated as transparent windows into language ideology, the reality is more complex because there are so many other procedural and interpersonal factors involved.

If the judicial construction of Europe was not catalyzed by innately activist judges, who were the pioneers of change? Focusing on the 1960s-early 1980s, Chapter 5 introduces the first Euro-lawyers: A vanguard of independent-minded WWII survivors who sought to unite Europe via bottom-up lawyering. Less institutionally constrained than judges, they nonetheless had to erode ubiquitous knowledge deficits and habits embodied by courts and clients. To this end, they cultivated local litigants and disputes exposing national barriers to European integration; constructed test cases to introduce local judges to European rules they hardly knew; cajoled their interlocutors to solicit the ECJ by ghostwriting their referrals; and thus generated opportunities for the ECJ to render pathbreaking judgments. The chapter combines oral history interviews, materials from the ECJ and lawyers’ personal archives, secondary historiographies and newspaper records, and geocoded data of the first referrals to the ECJ. The chapter speaks to readers seeking a new perspective on the origins of European integration, the creativity and mischievousness of strategic litigation, how lawyers cultivate the rights-consciousness of litigants and the activism of judges, and how individuals promote novel practices that cut against imagined possibilities.

Chapter 1 illuminates the concealed politics behind the growing reliance on law and courts to shape public policy and resolve political struggles. Focusing on what is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and the "judicialization of politics" – the European Union (EU) – the chapter develops a revisionist theory of lawyers, courts, and political development that animates this book. Beneath the radar, the EU's political development through law is an exemplary story of how lawyers mobilize courts to catalyze institutional change – alongside the limits, mutations, and consequences accompanying these efforts. It is a story that places in stark relief how political orders forged through networks of courts emerge, why judges would resist these institutional changes when they would augment their own power, and the conditions whereby lawyers can overcome bureaucratic and political resistances to judicialization. The chapter introduces the concept of ghostwriting to describe lawyers who act as agents of change while cloaked behind the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist judges. It then outlines a research design to exhume how the politics of lawyers shaped the tortuous development of the world’s sole supranational polity, concluding with a roadmap for the rest of the book.