Law Commons^™

Agency In State Agencies, Anya Bernstein

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 5 in Distributed Agency, N. J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman, eds.

The democratic state is an administrative state: the actual work of representative governance is done primarily in administrative agencies, which interpret and implement the often vague ambitions inscribed in statutes. When we talk about agency in the state, then, we must primarily be talking about agency in agencies. That may seem odd. Bureaucracy seems like the absence of agency: just mechanistic gear-grinding continuing things begun by other, distant, powerful actors. Where can agency find a foothold amid the faceless people, the featureless buildings, the infinite red …

Litigation & Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction In Industrial America, 1870–1958, Edward A. Purcell Jr.

Books

Through the prism of litigation practice and tactics, Purcell explores the dynamic relationship between legal and social change. He studies changing litigation patterns in suits between individuals and national corporations over tort claims for personal injuries and contract claims for insurance benefits. Purcell refines the "progressive" claim that the federal courts favored business enterprise during this time, identifying specific manners and times in which the federal courts reached decisions both in favor of and against national corporations. He also identifies 1892-1908 as a critical period in the evolution of the twentieth century federal judicial system.