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.

In Public Pensions, Susan M. Sterett traces the legal and constitutional structures underlying early social welfare programs in the United States. Sterett explains the status of state and local government payments for public servants and the poor from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression. The most visible public payments for service in the United States were directed to soldiers, who risked death for the nation. However, firemen, not soldiers, first captured local governments attention; social welfare programs for soldiers were modeled on firemen's pensions. The dangerous work of firefighting and of combat provided the fundamental legal analogy for courts as governments expanded pensions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing about the state court doctrine approving payments for dangerous, local service would allow pensions for indigent mothers and for the elderly, which states began to consider after 1910. Counties and railroads that objected to the new taxes could fight programs based on the old doctrine, established for firefighters, soldiers, and finally civil servants. State litigation provided one of the many grounds for contesting expanded welfare states in the early twentieth-century United States. Sterett demonstrates that state courts maintained a gendered division between the service that marked citizenship and the dependence that marked indigence, even during the promising ferment of the early twentieth century."