Vol. 10 No. 10 (October 2000) pp. 581-583.

DRINKERS, DRIVERS AND BARTENDERS: BALANCING PRIVATE CHOICES AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY by Frank A. Sloan, Emily M. Stout, Kathryn Whetten-Goldstein, and Lan Liang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 293 pp. Cloth $50.00 Paper $22.50.

Reviewed by Thomas A. Schmeling, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University- New Brunswick.

The human and economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption are enormous, and a significant part of these are related to drunken driving. THE NEW YORK TIMES recently reported (Oct. 4, 2000) that 15,935 traffic deaths, or 38 percent of the total of 41,471, were attributable to drunken driving. Meanwhile, 10 percent of all arrests in 1994 were for driving while intoxicated (p. 217) and in the mid-1990s DUI charges accounted for almost 40 percent of jail admissions (p. 92). When policy makers have approached the problem, it has often been by applying harsher criminal sanctions to drinkers themselves. Indeed, as I write this review, the House of Representatives has passed legislation designed to force states to lower their levels of legal intoxication to 0.08 percent blood alcohol content, despite debate over whether further limits on individual liberty will significantly lower traffic fatalities. Despite the seriousness of the problem, public policy scholars
only recently have devoted significant attention to this problem and the methods employed to control it.

DRINKERS, DRIVERS AND BARTENDERS is a timely and well-executed examination of the effectiveness of the various "policy tools" designed to limit the costs of excessive drinking. It also has a good deal to say about the effectiveness of tort law as a means or social control, which will make the book of interest to many law and courts scholars.DRINKERS, DRIVERS AND BARTENDERS addresses this important area of public policy by analyzing new data, taken largely from the authors' nationwide survey of commercial servers and their employees, on the effectiveness of various policy mechanisms in controlling alcohol consumption. The authors' main finding is that tort law remedies against commercial servers of alcohol, in the form of dram shop laws, are more effective than either administrative or criminal regulation in altering the behavior of those who provide alcohol service, and thus in reducing the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities.

The first chapter examines levels of alcohol consumption in the U. S., the social costs of heavy drinking, and the goals, rationale, and forms of alcohol regulation. Chapters 2 through 5 examine specific forms of alcohol regulation: Administrative control of liquor licenses and licensees, criminal sanctions for illegal alcohol service, tort liability of drunk drivers, and tort liability of commercial servers. In most of these chapters, the authors examine the effect of policy on the perceptions of
those providing alcohol service, for example the perceived probability of citation by an Alcoholic Beverage Commission or by law enforcement agencies, or of lawsuits based

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on the servers' violation of dram shop laws. Chapter 3 concludes that, "unless police resources are plentiful, the police do not provide an effective means of controlling alcohol consumption and do not deter bad server behavior, which would in turn reduce drunk driving." (p. 90). In contrast, Chapter 5 concludes that, "in states with strict dram shop laws, respondents perceived a higher probability of being sued for serving an intoxicated adult" (p. 140).

Previous research on the effects of dram shop liability cited by, and in some cases carried out by, the authors of DRINKERS, DRIVERS, AND BARTENDERS has established a correlation between dram shop laws and reduced traffic fatalities. Chapters 7 and 8 provide the crucial link in the causal argument for these laws' effectiveness. The main finding of these chapters is that "increased probability of a suit, as perceived by bar owners and managers, raised the bar's level of precaution in serving obviously intoxicated adults" (p. 194). The threat of a lawsuit was more likely to lead to policies such as limiting service to intoxicated persons and
providing them rides, than was the threat of administrative or criminal sanctions. The authors argue that criminal law is a less effective deterrent than tort because of low criminal penalties, uncertain enforcement and punishments, and the likelihood of plea bargaining. Moreover, although the availability of insurance is often thought to mitigate the deterrent effects of tort law, the authors find that its effects are largely absent in this area, since many alcohol servers do not carry protection against this sort of claim.

A nicely laid-out and detailed table of contents and numerous section headings within chapters provides helpful guidance through the book's argument. Most of the analysis is straightforward regression analysis, which presented in a clear manner. When logistic regressions are employed, marginal effects are included to aid the reader in interpreting the results. An appendix discusses the survey instrument employed to collect the data on server behavior. The survey itself is well-conceived and carefully designed, and the authors are sensitive to and include extensive controls for demographic and other variables that might confound the effects of policies.
The book is informed by a law-and-economics approach and includes discussions of "the market for criminal activities" (p. 70) and equations describing an individual's "net utility from drinking" (p. 223). However, this sort of formal, rational-choice analysis appears somewhat sporadically throughout the book and thus, to this reader, did not seem to further the analysis greatly. On the other hand, since the reader is not overwhelmed by equations and utility curves, those unfamiliar with or hostile to this sort of approach should not be deterred from reaping the full benefits of this book.

The authors consider their audience to be public officials or private citizens interested in alcohol policy; scholars in the fields of addiction and alcohol control policy; scholars in law and economics; and scholars in health economics. I believe the book will be of interest to all of these, as well as to those interested in the debate over "tort reform." Because early sections of the book catalog the various "policy tools" involved in the regulation of alcohol and discuss the relative advantages of different types of sanctions in achieving policy goals generally, the book might work as a supplementary text in an advanced course on public policy as well.

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DRINKERS, DRIVERS AND BARTENDERS is a sophisticated and solid analysis of a pressing social problem, and its value as a work or scholarship is matched by its practicality and important implications for policy makers concerned with the social costs of excessive alcohol consumption. I suspect as well that it will be, as it should be, often cited in the debates over the value of tort law as means of social control.