Beyond Camelot: Rethinking Politics and Law for the Modern State

This book argues that many of the basic concepts that we use to describe and analyze our governmental system are out of date. Developed in large part during the Middle Ages, they fail to confront the administrative character of modern government. These concepts, which include power, discretion, democracy, legitimacy, law, rights, and property, bear the indelible imprint of this bygone era's attitudes, and Arthurian fantasies, about governance. As a result, they fail to provide us with the tools we need to understand, critique, and improve the government we actually possess. "Beyond Camelot" explains the causes and character of this failure, and then proposes a new conceptual framework, drawn from management science and engineering, which describes our administrative government more accurately, and identifies its weaknesses instead of merely bemoaning its modernity. This book's proposed framework envisions government as a network of connected units that are authorized by superior units and that supervise subordinate ones. Instead of using inherited, emotion-laden concepts like democracy and legitimacy to describe the relationship between these units and private citizens, it directs attention to the particular interactions between these units and the citizenry, and to the mechanisms by which government obtains its citizens' compliance. Instead of speaking about law and legal rights, it proposes that we address the way that the modern state formulates policy and secures its implementation. Instead of perpetuating outdated ideas that we no longer really believe about the sanctity of private property, it suggests that we focus on the way that resources are allocated in order to establish markets as our means of regulation. Highly readable, "Beyond Camelot" offers an insightful and provocative discussion of how we must transform our understanding of government to keep pace with the transformation that government itself has undergone.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Chapter One: Introduction 1 The Thesis 1 The Method 12 The Administrative State 22 PART I: THE STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT 37 Chapter Two: From Branches to Networks 39 The Government as Body and Branches 39 The Modern Image of a Network 48 Applying the Network Model 56 Chapter Three: From Power and Discretion to Authorization and Supervision 74 Power and Discretion 74 Authorization and Supervision 91 The Microanalysis of Intra-Governmental Relations 96 Chapter Four: From Democracy to an Interactive Republic 110 The Pre-Modern Concept of Democracy 110 Electoral Interaction 120 Administrative Interaction 131 Chapter Five: From Legitimacy to Compliance 144 The Pre-Modern Concept of Legitimacy 144 The Compliance Model 160 The Large-Scale Application of the Compliance Model 171 Conclusion to Part I 179 PART II: LEGAL OPERATIONS 189 Chapter Six: From Law to Policy and Implementation 191 Law and Regularity 191 Policy and Implementation 203 The Morality of Policy and Implementation 214 Chapter Seven: From Legal Rights to Causes of Action 227 The Concept of Legal Rights 227 Causes of Action 237 Causes of Action v. Legal Rights 246 Chapter Eight: From Human Rights to Moral Demands on Government 260 Natural Rights and Human Rights 260 The Concept of Moral Demands on Government 268 The Content of Moral Demands on Government 287 Chapter Nine: From Property to Market-Generating Allocations 296 Property as Control 296 Market-Generating Allocations 308 The Protection of Individual Interests 323 Conclusion to Part II 330 Notes 341 Author Index 455 Subject Index 459

About the Author :
Edward L. Rubin is dean of Vanderbilt University Law School. He is the author of "Judicial Policymaking and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons and Federalism: A Theoretical Inquiry", both with Malcolm Feeley. He has served as a legal consultant to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.

Review :
This ambitious work offers a refreshing, insightful reconceptualization of the modern administrative state... [A] beautifully written contribution. Harvard Law Review [A] fascinating and provocative book... Rubin is to be congratulated. Beyond Camelot is an extraordinary effort, brilliant in places; it is certain to provoke a great deal of thought and suggest numerous avenues of future research. -- Howard Schweber Journal of Politics Anyone who desires to understand modern government should read Beyond Camelot. -- Brian Z. Tamanaha Law and Politics Book Review