Most recent books and articles about judicial politics expend scholarly energy in the study of the behavior of legal elites or the description and critique of the rules and doctrines constructed by elites. However, in OVERSEERS OF THE POOR, political scientist John Gilliom offers a most intriguing--if brief--foray into the grassroots politics of rights. Using forty-eight semi-structured interviews with female welfare (Aid for Families with Dependent Children--AFDC) clients from the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio conducted during the mid-1990s, Gilliom explores the meaning of privacy rights and the political power of the state.

Gilliom's book evaluates two provocative propositions. First, he asserts that surveillance, "the increasingly routine use of personal data and systematic information in the administration of institutions, agencies, and businesses" (p. 2), is the primary technique by which elites exercise political power over the poor. This proposition, defined in the studies of sexuality and the final lectures of Michel Foucault (1980, 1991) and explored at length by British scholars Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1990, 1992, 1996) and the Australian sociologist Pat O'Malley (1991, 1993), is not new. However, Gilliom also contends that it is central to any understanding of the management of the American poor. Second, Gilliom argues that the reaction of poor women to surveillance was not couched in the language and action of
privacy rights. Rather, they said "very little about the idea of rights, or of privacy, or of other potentially emancipatory legal claims" (p. 5). This evidence leads him to propose that opposition to surveillance has "very little to do with the ongoing mainstream legal and policy debates about right to privacy and due process" (p. 6).

Gilliom evaluates his propositions in the five following chapters. First, he employs locally collected historical information to describe the increasing surveillance of welfare mothers over time. The surveillance, he contends culminated in the appearance of a computerized client information system known as CRIS-E. According to Gilliom, the record keeping urge, culminating in the "information panopticon" that is CRIS-E, had a political meaning. It symbolized the broad reaching efforts of the state to collect information--with great efficiency--on the poor. Also, it signified the capacity of the state to use information and exert its power to monitor the
diverse aspects of the lives of poor mothers.

In the next chapter Gilliom uses interview material to describe how welfare mothers perceived surveillance of their lives. Needless to say, most resented the intrusion of the state into their personal financial

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choices and living arrangements. Especially they resented the intrusive enforcement of legal limitations and detailed administrative rules that the state imposed on their behavior (family life and sexual activity), income, and expenditures just so they could qualify to receive a payment that was insufficient for their economic survival. The interviews thus portray people who were thrust into political and economic powerlessness, hassles with the state's employees, and degradation--not just because of administrative legality but also because of the overweening surveillance that accompanies it.

Despite the appearance of CRIS-E, in the next chapter Gilliom contends that there are limits to the state's authoritarian tendencies in the acquisition and use of information to supervise the poor. Using interview data, he argues that the interviewed welfare mothers did not always "lump it." They could resist surveillance. Yet, it is the form of the resistance that was important. The mothers did not use the discourse of rights, let alone make rights claims against the state in adjudicatory forums. Instead, they complained to each other or undertook illegal or deceptive actions to avoid surveillance and control by the state. Gilliom suggests that the
welfare mothers thus stood outside the Western idea of the rights-bearing individual who can deploy legal action to offset abuses of official power. Because of ignorance of rights and the complexity of AFDC's administrative rules, fear of sanctions, economic need, and political powerlessness, the mothers simply lacked the expertise, resources, and opportunity to think legally, employ privacy rights, and challenge the surveillance of their lives.

Then, Gilliom describes the practice of resistance of surveillance by welfare mothers. In resistance, the mothers sometimes found assistance in state social services administrators who will tweak the rules to help them. However, much of the resistance was more individual acts of subterfuge, concealment, and evasion. Although interview data that illustrates these practices is slim, making this one of the weakest sections of the book, Gilliom concludes that surveillance forces welfare mothers into these actions and forces them to lie to those who manage their lives.

In the final chapter Gilliom explores the meaning of both surveillance of welfare mothers-the evidence related to his first proposition-and the mothers' practice of a politics of resistance via subterfuge rather than the a politics of rights and legal action-the evidence related to his second proposition. His argument is that the politics of rights presumes a "hyper-individualist understanding of life and society" (p. 121). However, he finds that the creeping expansion of surveillance and the use of the data it generates by the state to make people "over in its vision" (p. 131) disempowers many in the polity and concentrates power in the hands of the few. It is a tendency that many persons cannot effectively challenge. The value of rights and legal action thus appears as a myth if not a lie.

In my estimation Gilliom's book provides two important lessons. In a style that is readily accessible to both scholars and university students, he tells us that the idea of right-bearing individuals who can effectively assert the courage of their convictions and defend their personal liberty and autonomy through law and legal action is but a myth. Rather, he provides evidence that legality-privacy rights and due process--is largely absent from the world of the poor-and perhaps other Americans-

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and that law rarely empowers them. They are too often subjects of surveillance, caught in a machinery of paternalistic oversight that tries to define how they should live their lives. Second, the use of law to resist such oversight is beyond the knowledge and capacity of many persons. They sense subjection, but the world of disputing, cause lawyers, and legal services is too often beyond their grasp. Instead, they resist in ways that ignore democratic procedures and that deny the legitimacy of politics and government. Together these lessons help convince me that Americans live in one of two worlds-one in which the core faith is the value of the rule of law and another in which law and politics are deemed subjective and deserve to be subverted.

Although insightful, Gilliom's presentation nonetheless has limitations. One is the question of the reliability of his findings given his use of a case study methodology and a small sample. Another limitation is his neglect of how gender figures in the politics of rights and surveillance. Does the control of poor women by the state have any special significance or meaning?

The book's epilogue drew my attention to a third limitation of the book. The epilogue describes Gilliom's reaction to a search of his family's home by police who were looking for evidence of marijuana cultivation. Although Gilliom insightfully uses his personal experience to recount the sensations of frustration, anger, powerlessness, and abuse of the self that flow from surveillance, the epilogue describes a different form of surveillance than exists in the lives of welfare mothers. Surveillance of welfare mothers is an ongoing and detailed means of control of a powerless class; searches by police are episodic interventions by, as Gilliom describes them, overzealous and legally incompetent local political figures. Yet, he is right that both situations involved the politics and power of surveillance. Thus, his two case studies present scholars with the possibility of having to decipher the linkage of law to the multiple forms of surveillance that might exist. Indeed, since the Congress replaced AFDC with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and required that state governments reduce the welfare rolls, a new system of surveillance and control of the poor has emerged. Also, a topic not addressed by Gilliom is the expanded surveillance of the individual by corporations. From the supermarket scanner to the Internet cookie the modern corporation is ensuring its survival and its shareholders power and profits by the surveillance of tastes and
expenditures. What does this bode for political power and privacy rights?

A fourth limitation is revealed by Gilliom's reification of "the state." Throughout the book he fails to specify exactly who is gaining power from surveillance of welfare mothers. Is it caseworkers? Is it Ohio's appointed or elected officialdom? Is it taxpayers, voters, interests groups, corporations, or some other body? Or, as I suspect, is it some complex of all of them? By throwing at us the term "the state," Gilliom does not examine those multiple power centers, flows of political and economic power, and multiple regimes of surveillance (caseworkers over the poor, state bureaucrats over caseworkers, elected officials over state bureaucrats,
interest groups and corporations over elected officials), and diverse acts of resistance that are the centerpiece of Michel Foucault's (1980: 81-102) conception of power. Thus, the problem facing scholars is how to go beyond Gilliom and more richly depict not just the scope of surveillance but its

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complex effect on the slippery questions of who has power, how they use the judicial process to defend their power, and whether power-deprived persons
can use legal forms to assert their privacy rights and personal autonomy.

Despite these limitations, I strongly urge scholars and their students to read Gilliom's book. Reading it will encourage thought about the effectiveness of rights and the political meaning of law and judicial actions beyond traditional, instrumentalist approaches to "judicial impact." Although law professors will crank out their books on the legitimacy of judicial review and political scientists will model and remodel cert decision making by the Supreme Court's justices, Gilliom's approach suggests the value of looking beyond the instruments of judicial action and into how law constitutes the politics and defines the disposition of political power. My frustration with his book thus is not what he did but that he could not do more on this topic. Perhaps that is why I believe the assessment of public understandings of law and legal action should be high on the agenda of future judicial politics scholarship.

REFERENCES:

Foucault, Michel. 1980. THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME I: AN INTRODUCTION. New York: Vintage Books.

------ .1991. "Governmentality." In THE FOUCAULT EFFECT: STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. 1990. "Governing economic life," ECONOMY AND SOCIETY 19: 1-31.

O'Malley, Pat. 1991. "Legal Networks and Domestic Security," STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY 11: 171-90.

------. 1993. "Containing Our Excitement: Commodity Culture and the Crisis of Discipline," STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY 13: 159-86.

Rose, Nikolas. 1996. "Governing 'advanced' liberal democracies," in FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL REASON: LIBERALISM, NEO-LIBERALISM AND RATIONALITIES OF GOVERNMENT. Ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

------ and Peter Miller. 1992. "Political Power beyond the State: problematics of government," BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 43: 173-205.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Richard A. Brisbin, Jr.