Vol. 5 No. 2 (February, 1995) pp. 30-32

COURTS, POLITICS, AND JUSTICE, 3rd Ed., by Henry R. Glick. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1993. 452 pp. Paper $39.

Reviewed by Phyllis Farley Rippey, Department of Political Science, Western Illinois University.

Just as more questions are raised than answered in law, Henry Glick raises more questions than he answers in COURTS, POLITICS, AND JUSTICE. This is all to the good; especially since his text is well placed in an undergraduate political science classroom. With students immersed in a society that idealizes and romanticizes courts, lawyers, and the law, it is imperative that those of us seeking to educate them about law have texts that do not further foster the facile myths with simplistic answers. Works that focus on "the law" and deny the play of politics are useless as explanations of our legal system. Glick points the student to the role played by both the legal and popular cultures in his opening chapter and keeps this theme alive throughout the book. He insistently cautions against divorcing law from politics in any study of courts and he also keeps reminding the reader that the legal system is not run by disembodied agents, but rather people who bring interests, perspectives, and foibles to their work. He says, "Law is not adequate for understanding judicial decisions....Personal decision making and compromise are the keys to understanding how disputes are settled....We have to approach courts from the perspective of judicial politics, not law" (p.21).

Using this perspective, Glick describes the structure of both state and federal court systems in rather broad generalities and reminds us that you cannot understand what is going on by looking at the apparent hierarchy of the systems on paper. He points to the wide differences among localities, states, and regions and once again returns to the theme of human beings making decisions because of realities particular to them. Consequently, those who attempt to bring about court reform, to name one issue he raises, will fail unless they factor in the psychological, political, and social forces acting on the decision makers. His back and forth movement between how the system is, or works, on paper and the forces impinging on it to deny that picture makes his book an excellent lever for gently prying loose the naive beliefs that most undergraduates bring to classes on the law.

Given its audience of undergraduates, the text offers what I consider an appropriate mix of extended prose interspersed with charts, tables, and examples of legal documents. In this age of mixed media and factoids delivered in flashes, the book is clearly behind the times, however. Again, though, I see this as a plus. One actually must read the text to understand the points and cannot, instead, browse through diagrams and bits of boxed information and expect to learn sufficiently. It lends itself, therefore, to upper division courses which test for knowledge with essay exams and want a text that can be the basis for class discussion. Some of my students (not the better ones) complained that it was hard to study for exams from the book because it was difficult to "find the facts" in it. While I would tend not to use a textbook at the graduate level and have used the book only in my upper division

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course, Glick's work is well above the introductory level and could be used as a quick introduction to courts and politics for graduate students not well grounded in the field. It presumes solid understanding of American politics generally with its concept of federalism and an appreciation for the demands of democratic theory; it is not on the knowledge or fact gathering rung of the learning ladder.

Its organization and the aspects of law and politics covered underscores its higher aspirations. How well texts are organized depends to some degree upon how we teach our courses; upon what matters most to us. Glick and I seem to care about the same issues. Setting the stage with his discussion about culture and judicial politics, he moves on to court organization and judicial selection, but stops along the way to give lawyers and law practice their due. Besides including an important piece of the puzzle in terms of what we know from research on the law, this focus on lawyers is always of great interest to students who quite often are taking the course because of their own ambitions to become attorneys themselves. His exploration, however, of the full spectrum of the profession, put as it is in the context of politics, sometimes deflates students' enthusiasm for legal work. Perhaps, not a bad unintended result.

Separating discussion of criminal from civil cases into two chapters, the middle third of the book gets to the heart of what most students think of when they think of courts and the law: criminal law, dispute resolution, trials, and judicial decision making. In examining these topics, Glick lays out the steps and procedures and notes the actors involved, but he does more than this. He critically analyzes why these steps are triggered, who is likely to win or lose in the process, where and how power is exercised, and what issues are raised at these points. He is clearly unsatisfied simply to describe, but he is also not willing to impose his conclusions as fact. The text is generously peppered with references to the research of the public law field which is offered as possible or competing explanations generally and, occasionally, as the view around which a consensus has formed. This gives a truth searching rather than truth knowing tone to the book which scholars should find appealing but students sometimes find frustrating. Since their frustration derives from their difficulty with complexity and ambiguity in the world rather than the book's being unclear or disorganized, the book is good "medicine" for them.

Besides being good for students, the work offers itself as a useful reference source for scholars unfamiliar with the issues raised by public law scholars in their research on the law. For public law scholars, it breaks no new ground. It is deeply and firmly situated in legal realism and offers confirmation of what realists have long thought without taking that thinking to a higher level. I do not see this as a shortcoming, however. I take its intended audience to be undergraduates more than scholars and it suits that audience well. It is written well and at a sophisticated enough level to stimulate thought in better upper level students as it informs them about legal/political processes, issues, and actors. Because of the cultural baggage most students bring to courses on the law, the book can be

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considered provocative for exploding myths and for the explanations and issues to which it points. On the other hand, it is not so provocative as to alienate the yet-to-be persuaded. For all his arguments about courts as rooted in politics, Glick does not forget that courts are not legislatures and judges are not politicians.

In the concluding chapters Glick turns to an extended discussion of courts as policy makers and poses the question Stuart Scheingold (1972) put some twenty years ago: how good are courts as social change agents? Not surprisingly, Glick concludes that they are only part of a larger political and social system that must be factored into any explanation of change. Before reaching this conclusion, however, he does an excellent job of tracing the web of legal, social, and political interactions and concludes by looking at specific struggles into which courts have been pulled. In ending with courts and social change, Glick underscores both his legal realist view about the law and offers a normative judgement about what he considers to be the more pressing issues before the courts: civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants. That is what I, too, would accent. Those wanting a focus on the law from the perspective of the police, prosecutors, and privileged will have to look elsewhere.

Of the various texts I have used in my judiciary course, I find Glick's most amenable to what I want to focus on and a good core text around which I can build the entire course. I have not used it by itself and would consider it inadequate to the task of providing thought for an entire course. It has foundational value and works well interwoven with other works that focus on pieces of the picture only. Other books and essays attending to issues of race, class, and gender fit well with Glick's approach since he speaks to them explicitly and they are always implicit in his discussion; this greatly enhances its appeal, I believe. The only other text that I have liked as well for my course is Harry P. Stumpf's AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS (1988). It, too, is a solidly political science, not criminal justice, text and roots its ideas in politics and culture. My students, however, found Glick's book considerably more accessible and seemingly focused more on the issues of greatest interest to them.

It is said that we abhor in others those traits that we abhor in ourselves. I imagine the reverse is also true. Henry Glick has produced a text that, while more reticent in its critique than mine would be, portrays courts, politics, and justice the way I do and, thus, I endorse his effort with enthusiasm. What's more, he presents this very complex picture coherently and consistently with integrity and illumination. There would be no justice in asking for more.

Reference:

Scheingold, Stuart A. 1972. THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS: LAWYERS, PUBLIC POLICY, AND POLITICAL CHANGE. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stumpf, Harry P. 1988. AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.


Copyright 1995