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.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12225
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Published date: 01 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

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