Search results for ""Author Susan M. Sterett""

As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters, too. Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed insurance claims for lost commerce; when the claims were denied, some companies sued. Defense attorneys tried to get inmates released from prison, citing dangerous living conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic. Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan M. Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the effects of the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters.

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This comprehensive Research Handbook offers a multi-faceted analysis of the politics of law and courts and their role in governing. The authors develop new theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches to the study of law and courts as institutions, while accounting for the increasing diversity and complexity of the jurisdictions they oversee. The Research Handbook on Law and Courts features contributions from leading scholars in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, Latin America and a number of European countries, enriching the scope of theoretical development in the field and identifying areas for future research. Chapters address courts' centrality to governance by explaining how they participate in holding democratic administrations politically accountable, as well as by highlighting the political significance of court decisions concerning citizenship and inclusion. Chapters include studies of interactions between legal arguments, courts and other institutions that rely on law, as well as reflections on the physical and digital spaces of law. This volume also examines demographic diversity in judging before concluding with discussions of increasing digitization and computing power, and the significance of both for legal processes and sociolegal scholarship. Scholars concerned with courts and political accountability in complex, multi-layered governance will find this Research Handbook an invaluable resource. Since courts and legal structures are increasingly significant around the world, the Research Handbook will also be useful to other social scientists concerned with inclusion, representation, and accountability through law.

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