This is a review of Jody Freeman & Martha Minow, eds., Government By Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (Harvard Univ., 2009). After summarizing and analyzing the individual contributions to the volume, and delineating their disagreements, the review proceeds to identify areas of...

Privatization, a perennial feature of American governance, expanded significantly in the second Bush Administration but is now subject to an extensive re-assessment. Government by Contract, edited by Jody Freeman and Martha Minow, is an excellent and timely collection of essays on the subject....

When we speak of depoliticizing an administrative agency, what we mean is insulating it from direct presidential control. The resulting distinction between executive and independent agencies, however, is essentially invisible to Congress. All the mechanisms of control that Congress exercises...

Stephen Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make argues that presidential administrations can be organized into sequences defined by distinctive paradigms of governance: one president defines or “reconstructs” a new approach to government (e.g. Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt) one or more...

This paper explores the relationship between government actions and innovation in an environmental control technology - sulfur dioxide (SO2) control technologies for power plants - through the use of complementary research methods. Its findings include the importance of regulation and the...

Because federalism grants partial autonomy to subunits of a nation, it has potentially broad implications for a system of international law that is centered around the integrity of nation states. Military intervention by foreign nations might seem more justifiable if its purpose is to protect...

Statutes dominate our legal system, but we have no theory about the best way to design them. The process that the U.S. Congress follows is haphazard and obscure. Any Member can introduce a bill. There are no requirements about who can draft the bill or how the basic decisions that it embodies...