How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation and the Struggle over Injury Compensation. By Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $39.95 cloth.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12244
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Date: 01 December 2016

questions and likely less informed than necessary to warrant consid-

ering their opinions in a constitutional conversation.

Regardless of my questions and my expressions of doubt,

although, is the bottom line on this book: Collins and Ringhand

challenge conventional wisdom on the purpose of confirmation

hearings in a way that will force scholars of the process to think and

to find additional ways to test their theory in future research, inject-

ing new life into the study of confirmation politics. In other words

and as noted earlier, the book does exactly what a scholarly book

ought to do.

***

How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation and the Struggle

over Injury Compensation. By Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Anna-Maria Marshall, Department of Sociology, Uni-

versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Political scientists have had a longstanding project of assessing the

significance of courts and litigation in the American political land-

scape (Haltom and McCann 2004; Kagan 2009; Silverstein 2009).

Many of the studies addressing this question focus on legal cam-

paigns brought by social movements, where new rights are part of a

larger symbolic struggle in addition to narrower legal claims for rec-

ognition (McCann 1994; Rosenberg 2008). While most of this

research has traditionally focused on courts, more recent studies by

Sean Farhang (2010) and Charles Epp (2009) have de-centered the

judiciary and concentrated on the relationship among courts and

other state actors in the legislature and administrative agencies,

emphasizing the mechanisms that shape judicial politics.

In their book, How Policy Shapes Politics, Barnes and Burke join

this debate to address some of the pressing questions that remain

open: Does litigation diminish activists’ interest in pursuing other

political strategies? Does litigation undermine political solidarity by

reducing collective problems into individual disputes about person-

al injuries? Does judicial politics generate counter-productive back-

lash that ultimately undermines the parties’ broader political goals?

This debate is at something of an impasse, with competing case

studies that have findings that answer these questions “Yes,” “No,”

and “Sometimes.” Barnes and Burke offer an elegant and original

research design that addresses these questions in a theoretically

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