Combining superb investigative reporting with incisive analysis, Jerry Mashaw and David Harfst provide a compelling account of the attempt to regulate auto safety in America. Their penetrating look inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spans two decades and reveals the complexities of regulating risk in a free society.

Hoping to stem the tide of rising automobile deaths and injuries, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. From that point on, automakers would build cars under the watchful eyes of the federal regulators at NHTSA. Curiously, however, the agency abandoned its safety mission of setting, monitoring, and enforcing performance standards in favor of the largely symbolic act of recalling defective autos.

Mashaw and Harfst argue that the regulatory shift from rules to recalls was neither a response to a new vision of the public interest nor a result of pressure by the auto industry or other interest groups. Instead, the culprit was the legal environment surrounding NHTSA and other regulatory agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The authors show how NHTSA's decisions as well as its organization, processes, and personnel were reoriented in order to comply with the demands of a legal culture that proved surprisingly resistant to regulatory pressures.

This broad-gauged view of NHTSA has much to say about political idealism and personal ambition, scientific commitment and professional competition, long-range vision and political opportunism. A fascinating illustration of America's ambivalence over whether government is a source of--or solution to--social ills, "The Struggle for Auto Safety" offers important lessons about the design and management of effective health and safety regulatory agencies today.

Seasoned by Salt is the fascinating account of a one-year cruise, from Connecticut to Grenada and back, undertaken by a sailing couple. The book alternates throughout between their two complementary voices as they relive their journey. They are not your average tourists. Their story is brimming with humor and high adventure, and reflects a deep understanding of the history, people, and economy of the many islands that they visited. During their journey, they develop an understanding of the historical bond between North America and the Caribbean, particularly their intertwined colonial past and their shared legacy of slavery and racial division. This book is a romance, a comedy, a search for personal meaning, and above all a wonderful sailing story that finds subtle parallels between individuals' relationships and nations' and explores the crucial and continuing ties between the sea and history.

Reasoned Administration and Democratic Legitimacy: How Administrative Law Supports Democratic Government explores the fundamental bases for the legitimacy of the modern administrative state. While some have argued that modern administrative states are a threat to liberty and at war with democratic governance, Jerry L. Mashaw demonstrates that in fact reasoned administration is more respectful of rights and equal citizenship and truer to democratic values than lawmaking by either courts or legislatures. His account features the law's demand for reason giving and reasonableness as the crucial criterion for the legality of administrative action. In an argument combining history, sociology, political theory and law, this book demonstrates how administrative law's demand for reasoned administration structures administrative decision-making, empowers actors within and outside the government, and supports a complex vision of democratic self-rule.

Reasoned Administration and Democratic Legitimacy: How Administrative Law Supports Democratic Government explores the fundamental bases for the legitimacy of the modern administrative state. While some have argued that modern administrative states are a threat to liberty and at war with democratic governance, Jerry L. Mashaw demonstrates that in fact reasoned administration is more respectful of rights and equal citizenship and truer to democratic values than lawmaking by either courts or legislatures. His account features the law's demand for reason giving and reasonableness as the crucial criterion for the legality of administrative action. In an argument combining history, sociology, political theory and law, this book demonstrates how administrative law's demand for reasoned administration structures administrative decision-making, empowers actors within and outside the government, and supports a complex vision of democratic self-rule.

What are the possibilities and prospects for Social Security over the decades ahead? The essays in this interdisciplinary study explore what social insurance has meant historically, socially, economically, politically, and legally in the years since the founding of the American social security system in 1935. Questions examined include: Does Social Security have a coherent and defendable ideology? If so, is that ideology adequate to the demands of a contemporary political environment that seems to emphasize the re-privatization of many roles adopted by the modern welfare state? What explains the peculiarly feverish quality of recent Social Security politics--which has been characterized by periodic high anxiety, claims of doom and crisis, and rigid resistance to any alteration, followed by eventual marginal adjustment and continuing uncertainty about the future? Although the authors do not offer answers for all these questions, they convey confidence about the basic structure of American social security and optimism about its future possibilities. Contributors to the work are Robert M. Ball, Robert M. Cover, Michael J. Graetz, Rudolf Klein, Theodore R. Marmor, Jerry L. Mashaw, Michael O'Higgins, Paul Starr, and James Tobin. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What are the possibilities and prospects for Social Security over the decades ahead? The essays in this interdisciplinary study explore what social insurance has meant historically, socially, economically, politically, and legally in the years since the founding of the American social security system in 1935. Questions examined include: Does Social Security have a coherent and defendable ideology? If so, is that ideology adequate to the demands of a contemporary political environment that seems to emphasize the re-privatization of many roles adopted by the modern welfare state? What explains the peculiarly feverish quality of recent Social Security politics--which has been characterized by periodic high anxiety, claims of doom and crisis, and rigid resistance to any alteration, followed by eventual marginal adjustment and continuing uncertainty about the future? Although the authors do not offer answers for all these questions, they convey confidence about the basic structure of American social security and optimism about its future possibilities. Contributors to the work are Robert M. Ball, Robert M. Cover, Michael J. Graetz, Rudolf Klein, Theodore R. Marmor, Jerry L. Mashaw, Michael O'Higgins, Paul Starr, and James Tobin. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Brookings Institution Press and National Academy for Social Insurance publication This book presents a cross-cutting assessment of disability income policy in public and private programs in the United States and in European countries. It evaluates whether there is a crisis in disability benefit policy, drawing on an in-depth review of Social Security disability programs by a panel of national experts. In addition to highlighting the panel's findings and recommendations for reform, the authors debate issues in financing and delivering quality health care through Medicare and Medicaid for working-age persons with disabilities, and they examine new developments in how Workers' Compensation organizes and finances cash benefits and health care for workers injured on the job. These developments in benefits and health policy for disabled workers are examined in light of budget constraints and challenges posed by today's rapidly changing labor market. The book concludes with a provocative discussion of ""where are the jobs?""--an assessment of growing wage inequality between less skilled and highly skilled workers and the implication of labor market trends for goals of promoting employment among persons with chronic health conditions or disabilities. The contributors include Monroe Berkowitz, Rutgers University; Richard V. Burkhauser, Syracuse University; John Burton, Rutgers University; Philip de Jong, Institute for Law and Public Policy, Leiden University, the Netherlands; Alan Krueger, Princeton University; Katherine Newman, Harvard University; Van Ooms, Committee on Economic Development; Dallas Salisbury, Employee Benefit Research Institute; Leslie Scallet, Mental Health Policy Resource Center; and the Honorable Bruce C. Vladek, Health Care Financing Administration.

This groundbreaking book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. Jerry Mashaw demonstrates that from the very beginning Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority. The legislative and administrative practices of the U.S. Constitution's first century created an administrative constitution hardly hinted at in its formal text. This book, in the author's words, will "demonstrate that there has been no precipitous fall from a historical position of separation-of-powers grace to a position of compromise; there is not a new administrative constitution whose legitimacy should be understood as not only contestable but deeply problematic."

Social insurance in United States-including the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Medicare, Medicaid, and disability insurance programs that were added later -- may be the greatest triumph of American domestic policy. But true security has not been achieved. As Michael J. Graetz and Jerry L. Mashaw show in this pathbreaking book, the nation's system of social insurance is riddled with gaps, inefficiences, and inequities. Even the most popular and successful programs, Medicare and Social Security, face serious financial challenges from the coming retirement of the baby boom generation and the aging of the population.

This book challenges the notion that American social insurance must remain inadequate, unaffordable, or both. In sharp contrast to policymakers and analysts who debate only one income security program at a time, Graetz and Mashaw examine social insurance whole to assess its crucial role in providing economic security in a dynamic market economy. They recognize that, notwithstanding a proper emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility, Americans share a common fate that binds them together in a common enterprise. The authors offer us a new vision of the social insurance contract and concrete proposals to make the nation's families more secure without increasing costs.

Public choice theory should be taken seriously-but not too seriously. In this thought-provoking book, Jerry Mashaw stakes out a middle ground between those who champion public choice theory (the application of the conventional methodology of economics to political science matters, also known as rational choice theory) and those who disparage it. He argues that in many cases public choice theory's reach has exceeded its grasp. In others, public choice insights have not been pursued far enough by those who are concerned with the operation and improvement of legal institutions. While Mashaw addresses perennial questions of constitutional law, legislative interpretation, administrative law, and the design of public institutions, he arrives at innovative conclusions. Countering the positions of key public choice theorists, Mashaw finds public choice approaches virtually useless as an aid to the interpretation of statutes, and he finds public choice arguments against delegating political decisions to administrators incoherent. But, using the tools of public choice analysts, he reverses the lawyers' conventional wisdom by arguing that substantive rationality review is not only legitimate but a lesser invasion of legislative prerogatives than much judicial interpretation of statutes. And, criticizing three decades of "law reform," Mashaw contends that pre-enforcement judicial review of agency rules has seriously undermined both governmental capacity and the rule of law.

"Anyone interested in 'good government' should read Jerry Mashaw's new book on how the social Security Administration implements congressionally mandated policy for controlled consistent distribution of disability benefits. . . . He offers an important perspective on bureaucracy that must be considered when devising procedures for not only disability determinations but also other forms of administrative adjudication."-Linda A. O'Hare, American Bar Association Journal "A major contribution to the ongoing debate about administrative law and mass justice."-Lance Liebman and Richard B. Stewart, Harvard Law Review "Profound implications for the future of democratic government. . . . Practical, analytical policymaking for a complex decision system of great significance to many Americans."-Paul R. Verkuil, Yale Law Journal "An exceptionally valuable book for anyone who is concerned about the role of law in the administrative state. Mashaw manages to range broadly without becoming superficial, and to present a coherent and challenging theory in lively, readable prose. Bureaucratic Justice seems certain to become a standard reference work for administrative lawyers, and for anyone else who seeks the elusive goal of developing more humane and more effective public bureaucracies."-Barry Boyer, Michigan Law Review "Strongly recommended for use in graduate seminars in public policy or law. . . . If we are to develop a positive model of bureaucratic competence, we must answer the insightful questions rased in this cogent book."-David L. Martin, American Political Science Review "Mashaw provides an excellent analysis of middle range processes of decision making."-Gerald Turkel, Qualitative Sociology "Stimulating and provocative and . . . makes a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about due process in public administration.... It is tightly organized, cogently argued, and full of pithy historical illustrations. . . . One of the best such works in many years." -Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science "A thoughtful, challenging, and very useful book."-Choice "Inspires a new direction in administrative law scholarship."-A.I. Ogus, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies