How Policy Shapes Politics ─ Rights, Courts, Litigation, and the Struggle over Injury Compensation

The 'global rise of judicial powe' has been called one of the most significant developments in late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics. In this book, Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke examine the political consequences of the growing reliance on courts and litigation in public policy by analyzing the field of injury compensation, in which judicialized and bureaucratized programs operate side-by-side. Their study mixes quantitative data on a wide range of injury compensation policies with three in-depth case historical studies in which they trace political struggles over Social Security Disability Insurance, asbestos injury litigation, and the obscure but fascinating controversy over injuries purportedly caused by vaccines. They conclude that while social insurance programs that compensate for injury tend to bring social interests together, the use of litigation divides interests between victims and villains, winners and losers and so creates a comparatively fractious, chaotic politics.

Jeb Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California. A former litigator with a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and PHd from UC Berkeley, he has written extensively on the intersection between law, politics and public policy in the United States.

Tom Burke is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and at the University of California-Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program. He is the co-author with Lief Carter of the 8th edition of Reason in Law (2010) and the author of Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights (2002).