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Tort reform is a favorite cause for many business leaders and right-leaning politicians, who contend that out-of-control lawsuits throttle growth and inflate costs, particularly in healthcare. Less is said about how such reforms might affect the ability of individuals to recover damages for injuries suffered through another party's negligence. On that count, Texas--where efforts at tort reform have been energetic and successful--provides an opportunity to appraise the outcome for plaintiffs and their lawyers, an opportunity that Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin take full advantage of in this timely and provocative work. Because much of the action on tort reform takes place on the state leve...
In our modern American society, we find ourselves amidst a disheartening breakdown, where chaos prevails. The dominance of a few corporations stifles diversity across numerous sectors of our economy. Complex and biased laws and tax systems cater to special interests, while the upbringing of many children and the quality of education are skewed towards wealthy areas. Moreover, our online platforms inundate us with fraudulent schemes, adding to the societal disarray. This thought-provoking book offers a fresh perspective on historical change, presenting the idea that the Western world has undergone three distinct civilizations: the Greco-Roman, the Medieval, and the Enlightenment. With the pas...
The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world—about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people—while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world’s leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect indiv...
With the end of the Cold War, many commentators expected a renewed emphasis on domestic policy as a result of this major change in foreign policy. Until the attacks of 11 September 2001, this is exactly what happened. The “new world order” in domestic terms, celebrated the triumph of capitalism and free markets. At this time, Milton Friedman’s economic ideas were all the rage and Keynes completely out of fashion. The economic problems of the 1970s, in combination with the manifest failure of communist economies, had largely discredited the traditional notion of the Left and party rhetoric reflected this. Both the Democrats and Labour had begun in the 1980s (faced with the success of Re...
What will happen to American democracy? The nation's past holds vital clues for understanding where we are now and where we are headed. In The Cycles of Constitutional Time, the eminent constitutional theorist Jack Balkin explains how America's constitutional system changes through the interplay among three cycles: the rise and fall of dominant political parties, the waxing and waning of political polarization, and alternating episodes of constitutional decay and constitutional renewal. If America's politics seems especially fraught today, it is because we are nearing the end of the Republican Party's political dominance, at the height of a long cycle of political polarization, and suffering...
Eight prominent scholars consider whether Louis Hartz's interpretation of liberalism in his classic 1955 book should be repudiated or updated, and whether a study of America as a "liberal society" is still a rewarding undertaking.
Few American social programs have been more unpopular, controversial, or costly than Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Its budget, now in the tens of billions of dollars, has become a prominent target for welfare reformers and outraged citizens. Indeed, if public opinion ruled, AFDC would be discarded entirely and replaced with employment. Yet it persists. Steven Teles's provocative study reveals why and tells us what we should do about it. Teles argues that, over the last thirty years, political debate on AFDC has been dominated by an impasse created by what he calls "ideological dissensus"—an enduring conflict between opposing cultural elites that have largely disregarded p...
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An award-winning historian's pathbreaking book uses federal education policy from the Great Society to Reagan's New Morning to demonstrate how innovative policies become entrenched irrespective of who occupies the White House.
Compact, timely, well-researched, and balanced, this institutional history of Social Security's seventy years shows how the past still influences ongoing reform debates, helping the reader both to understand and evaluate the current partisan arguments on both sides.