Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury. By Anna Kirkland. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12317

the in-house counsel, CEOs, HR professionals and judges who con-

structed, managed and institutionalized a symbolic civil rights law at

the expense of mitigating deeply entrenched racist and sexist work-

places should be required to read Working Law.

References

Epp, Chuck (2009)Making Rights Real: Activists,Bureaucrats, and the Creationof the L egislative

State. Chicago:Univ. of ChicagoPress.

Dobbin, Frank (2009) Inventing Equal Opportunity.Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.

Sharkey, Patrick (2013) Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward

Racial Equality.Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Skrentny, John D. (1996) The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in

America. Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press.

Stainback, Kevin & Tomaskovic-Devy, Donald (2012) Documenting Desegregation: Racial

and Gender Segregation in Private Sector-Employment since the Civil Rights Act.

New York:Russell Sage Foundation Press.

***

Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury. By Anna Kirkland.

New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Carol A. Heimer, American Bar Foundation and

Department of Sociology, Northwestern University

Although most Americans probably believe that the federal and

state courts handle all civil legal cases, in fact the U.S. Congress has

placed a few matters, such as vaccine injuries, in the hands

of special courts. Kirkland’s illuminating and insightful book intro-

duces us to the vaccine court, created in 1986, a relatively obscure

hybrid institution where “parents, activists, researchers, doctors,

lawyers, and health bureaucrats come together to wrangle over

what vaccine injuries really are” (2) and which cases should receive

compensation. And although the special masters of the vaccine

court encounter a great deal of uncertainty as they try to decide

which injuries merit compensation, those judging this book have a

comparatively easy task: its considerable merits are easily discerned.

Through the hybrid institution of the vaccine court, law and sci-

ence work together to co-produce the “immunization social order,”

essentially the laws, institutions, biotechnologies, and social practi-

ces that jointly produce high levels of vaccine coverage. A stunning

success by any measure, the immunization social order has vastly

Book Reviews 273