The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.
Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

As the bicentenary of the Conseil d'Etat approaches, this new edition of the leading English-language text provides a detailed profile of the Conseil and offers an up-to-date overview of le droit administratif, which is regarded, alongside the Code Napoleon, as the most notable achievement of French legal science. The Conseil d'Etat is taken as a model for many administrative systems in Europe and beyond, and it continues to exercise a strong influence upon the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and the Third World. The eleven expanded appendices, including statistics, model pleadings and other illustrations, provide an invaluable and accessible source of information on the French administrative courts, their procedure and case-load. Throughout the approach is comparative, with frequent references to developments in United Kingdom administrative law and in the EC institutions. The book will be an invaluable guide to all students of French law and comparative public law.