A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution. By William N. Eskridge, Jr. and John Ferejohn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 592p. $85.00.

Extract

For some reason, the vast literatures on liberal republicanism and on American policymaking institutions have never quite had their expected courtship, much less received a proper introduction. This is odd, not least because each literature has always (consciously or less so) borne the problems of the other literature in mind. Much of the literature on republicanism has been undertaken with the idea of explaining the ideational roots of modern Anglo-American institutions (Eric Nelson on republicanism more generally, Karen Orren on contracts and labor arrangements, Jeremy Waldron on legislatures), or with eliciting the programmatic and ethical conclusions to which the philosophy underlying our institutions should lead us (Philip Pettit, Michael Sandel, Waldron again). And as scholars of American legislatures, agencies, and courts continue to document exhaustively the factual behavior of those institutions, many have begun to turn to the matches and mismatches between theoretical promise and institutional realities (Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, Richard Hall, Diana Mutz, and most recently Lawrence Lessig). Yet with some very recent exceptions—among them John McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy (2011) and Ira Katznelson's forthcoming volume, Fear Itself, on Congress and American liberalism—the conversation lacks synthetic treatments that take up the themes of both literatures in the same volume. Until now.