No Day In Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment. By Sarah Staszak. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12225
Date01 September 2016
Published date01 September 2016
through legitimate jobs with social lives centered on indoor activ-
ities like playing video games or older family members who created
a safe haven within the homes of wanted people.
Goffman draws excellent conclusions in the final section of the
book especially in the areas of police tactics in urban areas and
police-community relations. Her methodological note in the appen-
dix can stand alone as an essay for a research methods class. I look
forward to assigning my Sociology of Law class this book as it edu-
cates and entertains readers in equal fashion due to the superior
writing abilities of Goffman.
***
No Day In Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial
Retrenchment. By Sarah Staszak. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.
Reviewed by Christopher P. Banks, Department of Political Science,
Kent State University.
Sarah Staszak’s No Day In Court is an ambitious and comprehensive
treatment of the politics of securing access to courts and justice.
Staszak’s general claim is that “a wide array of rules, procedures,
and incentives” (p. 5) operate as “subterranean mechanisms” (p. 9)
that constrict access to courts for civil litigants that seek their day in
court as part of the rights revolution. This phenomenon, or
“judicial retrenchment “(p. 5), is theoretically explained bya conflu-
ence of “multiple coalitions, promoting different goals and interests,
which have changed over time” (p. 6). The key variables that eluci-
date judicial retrenchment are insularity, ideology and temporality
(p. 10); that is, different actors and interests constrict access by
autonomously maximizing their discretion within the institutional
framework of the federal judiciary to make the “rules of the game”
(pp. 5, 213) that advance their political goals in any given historical
time period.
Staszak adopts a historical institutional approach to test her
theory of judicial retrenchment within the context of four case stud-
ies that show that access to courts is restricted by imposing funda-
mental changes to the decision-makers, rules, venues, and
incentives that comprise adjudication (p. 34). For Staszak, the case
studies are illustrative of different “strategies” that are used by a
variety of institutional actors, coalitions and interests to restrict
Book Reviews 809

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