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Lawsuits over coffee burns, playground injuries, even bad teaching: litigation "horror stories" create the impression that Americans are greedy, quarrelsome, and sue-happy. The truth, as this book makes clear, is quite different. What Thomas Burke describes in Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights is a nation not of litigious citizens, but of litigious policies--laws that promote the use of litigation in resolving disputes and implementing public policies

Introduction : what we talk about when we talk about law / Thomas F. Burke & Jeb Barnes -- Adversarial legalism, civil rights, and the exceptional American state / R. Shep Melnick -- Seeing through the smoke : adversarial legalism and U.S. tobacco politics / Michael McCann & William Haltom -- Kagan's Atlantic crossing : adversarial legalism, Eurolegalism, and cooperative legalism in European regulatory style / Francesca Bignami & R. Daniel Kelemen -- Coping with auto accidents in Russia / Kathryn Hendley -- Overcoming the disconnect : internal regulation and the mining industry / Neil Gunningham -- Devolving standards : California's structural failures in response to prisoner litigation / Malcolm M. Feeley & Van Swearingen -- Style matters : on pattern analysis in the study of regulation / Cary Coglianese -- The politics of legalism / Thomas F. Burke & Jeb Barnes.

The 'global rise of judicial power' has been called one of the most significant developments in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century politics. In this book, Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke examine the political consequences of 'judicialization' - the growing reliance on courts, rights and litigation in public policy - by analyzing the field of injury compensation, in which judicialized and bureaucratized programmes operate side-by-side.