Stumpf wisely uses the aids of organizational charts we all used to photocopy and hand out in class because too many of the narrowly focused behavioral texts simply omitted them. Stumpf offers students a very comprehensive description of political science research on judicial selection and the numerous reform movements mobilized by professional and citizen groups. The bench, its stability and power over time, is the central theme in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 7 does a particularly good job at telling political science students about the legal profession, its formation, its role in shaping legal education, its monopoly over entry into practice, its role in creating and struggling to maintain a stratified bar as well as private versus state funded legal services. To the extent that we might want to or tend to separate these two approaches in our teaching, Stumpf puts them together in four chapters.
Students learn about disputing.
When students understand that disputing and conflict resolution are political processes, which employ local, state and federal workers, support the building of institutions and require the expenditure of resources, substantive fields of law traditionally not studied by political scientists, such as torts, contract, property and family law, are opened for inquiry. The text continues along the theme of understanding who comes into the criminal process, how they get there and what happens to them with once they arrive. Stumpf pay particular attention to the discretion of court-house actors who intercede or vanish along the way. In this course, disputing, litigation and judicial actors and institutions are studied first to them explore the constitutive role of law in four settings. A second setting Stumpf's text provides a background for is the Women's Movement, with specific attention to genderized workplace inequalities.