Response to Maria Popova's review of Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development

Extract

I thank Maria Popova for her generous, thoughtful, and constructive review of my book and am delighted to hear that despite my exclusively American focus, she finds much of import in my work for scholars of comparative judicial politics. In fact, her breakdown of the potentially generalizable theoretical insights to be drawn from my book was as edifying as it was gratifying. Needless to say, had I been aware of the ways in which some of the empirical phenomena I seek to explain in the American case have since been effectively replicated in, or speak to the circumstances of, other polities, I would have made a deliberate attempt to highlight that fact.