Jeb Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California. A former litigator with a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and PHd from UC Berkeley, he has written extensively on the intersection between law, politics and public policy in the United States. Tom Burke is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and at the University of California-Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program. He is the co-author with Lief Carter of the 8th edition of Reason in Law (2010) and the author of Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights (2002).

• List of Figures ; List of Tables ; Acknowledgements ; Chapter 1. Introduction ; Chapter 2. Congressional Hearings and the Politics of Adversarial and Bureaucratic Legalism ; Chapter 3. Social Security Disability Insurance: The Politics of Bureaucratic Legalism ; Chapter 4. Asbestos Injury Compensation: The Politics of Adversarial Legalism and Layered Policies ; Chapter 5. Vaccine Injury Compensation: The Politics of Shifting Policies ; Chapter 6. Conclusion ; Appendix I: Hearing Data ; Appendix II: Model of Hearing Participation ; Appendix III: Content Analysis of Interest Group Positions on the FAIR Act in the Media ; Works Cited ; Cases Cited

The contribution of the book is a map of policy complexity with a focus on two engaging "policy designs," adversarial and bureaucratic legalism. In this it advances the tradition of law and society scholarship by linking scholarship from the broader and more sophisticated study of law to the field through three lively cases.