No Day In Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment. By Sarah Staszak. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Abstract

No Day In Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment. By Sarah Staszak. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.Sarah Staszak's No Day In Court is an ambitious and comprehensive treatment of the politics of securing access to courts and justice. Staszak's general claim is that wide array of rules, procedures, and 5) operate as subterranean mechanisms 9) that constrict access to courts for civil litigants that seek their day in court as part of the rights revolution. This phenomenon, or retrenchment (p. 5), is theoretically explained by a confluence of multiple coalitions, promoting different goals and interests, which have changed over 6). The key variables that elucidate judicial retrenchment are insularity, ideology and temporality 10); that is, different actors and interests constrict access by autonomously maximizing their discretion within the institutional framework of the federal judiciary to make the of the game (pp. 5, 213) that advance their political goals in any given historical time period.Staszak adopts a historical institutional approach to test her theory of judicial retrenchment within the context of four case studies that show that access to courts is restricted by imposing fundamental changes to the decision-makers, rules, venues, and incentives that comprise adjudication 34). For Staszak, the case studies are illustrative of different strategies that are used by a variety of institutional actors, coalitions and interests to restrict court access over time 29). After clearly outlining her theory in chapter two, in the next chapter the author details the dramatic shift toward the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and mandatory arbitration agreements, a process that has removed federal judges from deciding contested cases involving consumer protection, employment contract, or student loan disputes. Chapter four then demonstrates how different legal and political interests advocated for rule changes that culminated in the Rules Enabling Act of 1934 and the 1938 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure-each are significant because they provide the foundation for the set of procedural rules that govern civil adjudications. As with the rise of ADR, the creation of procedural rules were born out of initial reform efforts that were designed to facilitate access but ultimately worked to deny it in the ensuing post-New Deal institutional struggle between the legislative and judicial departments' effort to control the rulemaking process, especially after the 1970s. In both chapters, the author effectively argues that while the anti-litigation posture of the Supreme Court in recent decades has contributed mightily to retrenchment, the phenomenon itself can only be explained by the convergence of a multiplicity of ideological (and sometimes apolitical) interests that is often bipartisan in nature in any given political time. …