The Political Dynamics of Systemic Legal Change
Channel: ANU TV
Date: 16/10/2012

Professor Emeritus Robert A. Kagan, University of California, Berkeley, presents The Political Dynamics of Systemic Legal Change as part of the Research School of Asia and the Pacific seminar series. 

Amidst the turmoil of democratic politics, we tend to think of legal systems as sources of stability and solidity, realms of precedent and tradition insulated from politics, realms where rational and objective decisionmaking prevail. But when sociolegal scholars like Robert Kagan look carefully at the law in action, not merely the law on the books, they find that legal systems are fundamentally shaped and influenced by political, economic and social factors. 

To understand the operation and evolution of legal systems, therefore, we must attend to the political dynamics of systemic legal change. For example, compared to other economically advanced democracies, the American legal and regulatory system has long been viewed as distinctive - exceptionally complex, more legalistic and adversarial, more punitive and costly, and politically more contentious. Why? Because, Professor Kagan explains in this lecture, the American political system is quite unique in many ways. 

Nevertheless, in a dynamic, inter-connected globalized world, national legal systems are under pressures to change, or even to converge. Robert Kagan discusses the political roots of American legal and regulatory exceptionalism. He discusses how a methodically- constructed and well-funded "conservative legal movement," deeply hostile to lawyer-driven, adversarial litigation, has changed the American legal system in the last two decades. Conversely, European legal and regulatory systems, now embedded in the political dynamics of the European Union, have become more like America's. Kagan concludes, however, that global legal convergence is not likely to occur. American legal exceptionalism, though faded a bit, does and will persist.

Professor Robert A. Kagan is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a JD from Columbia Law School (1962) and Ph.D. from Yale University (1974). He began teaching political science Berkeley in 1974, and in 1988 also joined the faculty of the Boalt Hall School of Law. From 1993 to 2004, with an interval in 2001, he was Director of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society. He has been a visiting professor or scholar at Oxford University, Harvard University, NYU Law School, Ohio State University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences. 

Most recently, Kagan co-edited (with Diana Kapiszewski and Gordon Silverstein) Consequential Courts (in press, Cambridge University Press), examining the impact on governance of high court decisions in a number of countries.

Professor Kagan is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In July, 2006, he received the Law and Society Association's Harry Kalven Prize for distinguished sociolegal scholarship, and in 2012, he was accorded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Law- Courts section of the American Political Science Association.

Presented by the Regulatory Institutions Network and the Research School of Asia and the Pacific.