Vol. 5, No. 9 (September, 1995) pp. 211-215.

Editors's Note: This review is the last of the series on judicial process textbooks. The other reviews appeared in February and March, 1995.

AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS by Harry P. Stumpf. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 476 pp. Cloth

Reviewed by Christine B. Harrington, Department of Politics and Institute for Law and Society, New York University.

We should all be on the look out for the second edition of AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS (available in 1996) since the first edition offers students a comprehensive description and engaging discussion of the essentials about the U.S. judicial process and sociolegal studies. Over the past decade and a half or so, I have performed a number of "pedagogical experiments" in my laboratory of undergraduate courses on "Law and Society," "Law and Social Change" and "Courts and Judges." Is there a comprehensive textbook that can provide undergraduates with a solid understanding of what, why and how social scientists study law in American politics? These experiments have been performed on students in a small college (Vassar College), a large state university (Rutgers University) and they are still taking place at a medium-sized undergraduate college situated in a large private university (New York University). Seven years ago when AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS first came out I put it to the test. Aside from the general question noted above, I wanted to know how well this textbook worked in a class of students who are diverse in several challenges ways: different levels of background knowledge about American politics, history and the legal system (weak high school education to two years of a very good college education); different levels of interest in the subject (none to this is my life); different economic and cultural experiences with the law (none to presently litigating some matter); and a host of other ad hoc subjective intuitions I have about what makes a class of 50 to 100 students click.

Stump's textbook passed the test. It even received informed praise from students who were self-ascribed "just-here-for-the-credit-types." Those who have taken it upon themselves to deeply embed law in their lives, or the other way around, and who will stand for no less than a text that came tell them something new, reported that they found reading Stumpf an "awesome" experience for it opened the doors of professional political science scholarship. Indeed, Stumpf's text does an excellent job at synthesizing methodology and research findings federal and state judicial appointments, federal and state appellate decision-making, civil litigation, criminal dispute processing and impact studies, to name a few of the major areas covered in this book. The section at the end of each chapter on "Further Reading" was actually meaningful to more than the usual handful of students. That is, about one quarter of my students reported that they looked up books and articles of particular interest because of Stumpf's illuminating presentation of related material. When I teach this text, the more avid readers of publications, such as THE NEW YORK TIMES or THE VILLAGE VOICE, regularly supply me with clippings related to sociolegal phenomena discussed in this textbook (e.g., the politics of judicial selection; tort litigation practices and reform campaigns; the perils of plea bargaining in urban courts; etc.).

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With knowledge of my experience teaching Stumpf, what does this book offer for those who have yet to try it? The conceptual framework of AMERICAN JUDICIAL POLITICS is laid out in the book's organization. There are four parts, each focuses on an important angle for understanding how and why law works the way it does in the American political context. Part I, "The Judicial Setting" has four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 ease students gently into what is often completely ignored or so abstractly presented it is meaningless--- "Jurisprudence Old and New: Ways of Thinking About Law," and "Law and the Judicial Function." From the start, students are presented with core concepts philosophers, lawyers and judges, and social scientists have applied in their studies of law (e.g., natural law; analytical or positive jurisprudence; sociological jurisprudence; legal realism; political and behavioral jurisprudence). This material is not easy to present to undergraduates. I often debate whether it should go at the beginning, middle or end of the course. Realizing that some of what I am "debating" is whether to teach it at all to undergraduates in a general introductory course, such as "Law and Society or "The Judicial Process," I plunge forth and go with Stumpf's ordering. I have concluded, after teaching with this book for about four semesters, that it is a good way to begin, though still challenging. Chapter 2 situates the theoretical material of Chapter 1 in current intellectual movements (e.g., Critical Legal Studies) and ongoing debates about the role of courts and rights in policy formation and implementation. The book ends with a chapter that raises these issues again, but does so through a description of sociolegal studies on compliance and impact. These first two chapters set out the debates over what law is and how it is connected to particular kinds of social relations, such as political and economic ideologies and institutions. These debates are implicit in what we teach, so why not put them on the table (chalkboard) from the beginning? The two other chapters in Part I cover more conventional material on state and federal judicial organization by situating courts in a historical context. This serves both as a supplement for students with weak American history backgrounds (three-fourths of my students) and as an excellent framework for learning the structure of the state and federal judicial systems. Stumpf wisely uses the aids of organizational charts we all used to photocopy and hand out in class because too many of the narrowly focused behavioral texts simply omitted them. Institutionalism is alive and well in this book, which strengthens its treatment of "The Judicial Setting."

The three chapters in Part II, "Judicial Personnel," focus on the politics of judicial selection at the state and federal levels (each meriting a chapter) and the politics of "legal advice" or the legal profession. Stumpf offers students a very comprehensive description of political science research on judicial selection and the numerous reform movements mobilized by professional and citizen groups. The bench, its stability and power over time, is the central theme in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 7 does a particularly good job at telling political science students about the legal profession, its formation, its role in shaping legal education, its monopoly over entry into practice, its role in creating and struggling to maintain a stratified bar as well as private versus state funded legal services.

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This chapter distinguishes this textbook from all others, in part, because Stumpf draws on literature outside political science, literature which is usually ignored by political scientists, such as occupational sociology and legal history. Stumpf's own scholarship, his interest and commitment, enrich the discussion of this subject -- a subject, lawyers and lawyering, students tend to take for grant if they come to the study of law as naive wantabees.

Part III, "The Judicial Process," is a skillful blend of judicial process and law and society scholarship. To the extent that we might want to or tend to separate these two approaches in our teaching, Stumpf puts them together in four chapters. Chapter 8, "The Civil Judicial Process," examines how cases get into the hands of lawyers and/or courts and why the vast majority of civil disputes do not. The process of disputing, including the use and non-use of law and the types of dispute institutions (formal and informal), are described. Students learn about disputing. They are then prepared to question cultural characterizations of Americans as "litigious" and to evaluate popular campaigns seeking to either expand or deny access to courts. This chapter demonstrates why the distinction between "public law" and "private law" makes so little sense. When students understand that disputing and conflict resolution are political processes, which employ local, state and federal workers, support the building of institutions and require the expenditure of resources, substantive fields of law traditionally not studied by political scientists, such as torts, contract, property and family law, are opened for inquiry. Chapter 9, "The Judicial Process in Criminal Cases," likewise brings students into the rich body of research on criminal courts and criminal dispute processing. The text continues along the theme of understanding who comes into the criminal process, how they get there and what happens to them with once they arrive. Stumpf pay particular attention to the discretion of court-house actors who intercede or vanish along the way. Chapters 8 and 9 give students a solid understanding of the trial process, which then lays the foundations for a comparison between trial and appellate institutions (Chapters 10 and 11).

Part IV, "Courts and Society," has two chapters on assessing the politics of the judicial process. These chapters raise squarely the questions I ask my "Law and Society" students: What are the politics of rights in the U.S.?; Under what conditions do people avoid or turn to rights? In what sense can we treat claiming an entitlement as a political practice or resource in the U.S.? Stumpf's Chapter 12, "Judicial Policies: Compliance, Implementation and Impact," and Chapter 13, "American Courts: An Assessment," cover research findings and debates over the effectiveness of judicial policy-making and more. Rather than hang courts out to take all the heat for policy-making, Stumpf does an excellent job of bringing into the picture other relevant forces -- legislatures, the executive, interest groups, public opinion, the media and, yes, that big messy category "society." Stumpf's gives meaning, if not order, to the "mess" we live with and live in everyday.

To the question of what types of supplementary material would be useful or obligatory for classroom use of AMERICAN

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JUDICIAL POLITICS, I would answer this according to what themes you want to emphasize in your course. I use Stumpf in my "Law and Society" class which is mainly a second-semester, first-year to a first-semester, third-year course (i.e., a broad sweep). In this course, disputing, litigation and judicial actors and institutions are studied first to them explore the constitutive role of law in four settings. One setting we look at is the Civil Rights Movement, where I supplement Stumpf with Mark Tushnet's (1987) THE NAACP's LEGAL STRATEGY AGAINST SEGREGATED EDUCATION, 1925-1950, or Timothy O'Neal's (1984) BAKKE AND THE POLITICS OF EQUALITY: FRIENDS AND FOES IN THE CLASSROOM OF LITIGATION and selected federal court cases. A second setting Stumpf's text provides a background for is the Women's Movement, with specific attention to genderized workplace inequalities. Here, Catharine A. MacKinnon's (1979) SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WORKING WOMEN, and/or Michael W. McCann's (1994) RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION work very well with Stumpf. The area of Class Action Torts is a third setting, where I use supplementary books, such as Howard Ball's (1986) JUSTICE DOWNWIND: AMERICA'S ATOMIC TESTING PROGRAM IN THE 1950'S; Paul Brodeur's (1985) OUTRAGEOUS MISCONDUCT: THE ASBESTOS INDUSTRY ON TRIAL; Steven Fox's (1991) TOXIC WORK: WOMEN WORKERS AT GTE LENKURT; Peter Schuck's (1986) AGENT ORANGE ON TRIAL: MASS TOXIC DISASTERS IN THE COURTS; or the ever favorite, if dated, Gerald M. Stern's (1976) THE BUFFALO CREEK DISASTER. The fourth setting we study is lower criminal courts where students read Barbara Yngvesson's (1993) VIRTUOUS CITIZENS, DISRUPTIVE SUBJECTS: ORDER AND COMPLAINT IN A NEW ENGLAND COURT. This book brings an explicitly cultural analysis of law to our concluding considerations of law as a the political process. We also use Stuart A. Scheingold's (1976) THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS. None of these supplementary books are absolutely necessary to fill a hole in Stumpf's book. Indeed, his book is the bridge between these books, which is why Stumpf is the core.

We often demand that authors do more when we review their work. It could be said of Stumpf that he does not do enough with the administrative processes or with comparative legal systems. Would we, however, have the time in an introductory judicial process/ law and society courses to teach all of what he covers and more in a meaningful way? Students learn that we live in a dual legal system. Stumpf does a superb job at integrating state judicial process material into the core of this text and provides a great taking off point for those of us who find federalism to be one of the hottest topics in American politics at the century's turn. For those of us who may not want to or do not have the time to "do state courts," you can go the "optional reading" route, making state courts optional without killing the book, but why? State courts have become essential reading. What I would like to see more of, and I know my students would enjoy, are pictures. Getting more graphic in our descriptions of law would put on display

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where and how law matters in American politics, in everyday life. I cannot reasonably demand more of Stumpf in terms of his levels of sophistication; they are multiple and just what I need to teach students with wide ranging skills and backgrounds. Finally, Stumpf does something that no other text I have used does -- he captures the richness of our work and the field out there ahead of us. AMERICAN JURIDICAL PROCESS enables students to see the boundaries of our approaches while not chopping up our work into tiny pieces. Judicial process and law and society scholarship are constitutive elements of the public law field, as is the study of doctrine, which also, thankfully, creeps into this text.

References

Ball, Howard Ball (1986) JUSTICE DOWNWIND: AMERICA'S ATOMIC TESTING PROGRAM IN THE 1950'S. New York: Oxford University Press.

Brodeur, Paul (1985) OUTRAGEOUS MISCONDUCT: THE ASBESTOS INDUSTRY ON TRIAL. New York: Pantheon.

Fox, Steve (1991) TOXIC WORK: WOMEN WORKERS AT GTE LENKURT. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

MacKinnon Catharine A. (1979) SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WORKING WOMEN. Yale University Press. New Haven: Yale University Press

McCann Michael W. (1994) RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

O'Neal, Timothy (1984) BAKKE AND THE POLITICS OF EQUALITY: FRIENDS AND FOES IN THE CLASSROOM OF LITIGATION.

Scheingold, Stuart A. (1976) THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Schuck, Peter (1986) AGENT ORANGE ON TRIAL: MASS TOXIC DISASTERS IN THE COURTS. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stern, Gerald M. (1976) THE BUFFALO CREEK DISASTER. Vintage Press.

Tushnet, Mark (1987) THE NAACP's LEGAL STRATEGY AGAINST SEGREGATED EDUCATION, 1925-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Yngvesson, Barbara (1993) VIRTUOUS CITIZENS, DISRUPTIVE SUBJECTS: ORDER AND COMPLAINT IN A NEW ENGLAND COURT. New York: Routledge.