Among the influences on American public policymaking, policy scholars have slighted statutory interpretation by the judiciary. Using insights derived from case studies of the judicial interpretation of statutes and subordinate rulemaking and adjudicatory practices in three welfare programs, R. Shep Melnick attempts to close this gap in the public policy literature. Contrary to recent arguments by Gerald Rosenberg, Melnick convincingly illustrates that federal district courts are significant generators of policy change. The result is an important, if incomplete, delineation of the role of the federal judiciary in the expansion of a nationalized and legalized system of entitlements to AFDC payments, food stamps, and education for the handicapped.

Among its attributes, Melnick's study has three especially admirable features. First, because of the dearth of detailed studies, he succeeds in drawing attention to the political significance of statutory interpretation. He discloses how judicial use of ambiguous statutory language contributed to the modification or redirection of the three programs. Also he indicates the exceptional consequences of this form of judicial activity for the content and costs of the welfare programs. He demonstrates statutory interpretation to be significant for the polity as the practice of constitutional interpretation.

Second, because the bulk of the book is composed of excellent policy histories, Melnick does more than discuss the judicial role in policy formulation and implementation. He provides richly detailed information about the interplay of courts and other policymakers that assist our general understanding of the growth of entitlement bureaus and their budgets and the political conflict about entitlement programs. Third, Melnick discloses how the institutional structure of American politics abets creative judicial statutory interpretation and often prevents the effective review of lower federal court rulings. In the spirit of the new institutionalism in political science, he describes how the structure of institutional rules prevent the policing of district court statutory interpretation by the Supreme Court, allow interest groups to pursue policy modifications, and induce sporadic congressional adjustment of judicial interpretations.

More problematic is Melnick's effort to explain the extent and nature of judicial intervention and modification of the three policies. At various places in the book, he sets forth nearly every variable that potentially contributes to an explanation of the extent and nature of judicial interpretations of the three policies. However , at no point are the variables examined as a unit or through a comparative analysis of their influence on the judicial interpretations of each program. For example, in Chapter Thirteen he discusses the influence of the constitutive power of the rule of law and what Stuart Scheingold has called the "myth of rights" on all participants in these policy arenas. Chapter One addresses the importance of statutory text and the lack of standards for the judicial reading of these texts. Chapters Two and Twelve discuss the influence of fragmented party government, Congressional operations, electoral and policy incentives, and separated powers on judicial interpretative discretion. The influence of judicial attitudes, often too crudely decried in activist-restraint terms, surfaces in Chapters Two, Three, and sporadically throughout the rest of the book. In his chapters on the specific programs judicial learning from earlier personal rights litigation, interest group litigation practices, and the Congressional ideology of entitlements also gain mention as influences on judicial interpretation. Only agency ideology and agency institutional practices in rulemaking and rule adjudication on policy formulation and implementation receive limited consideration as influences on judicial interpretations. Unfortunately, his inability to put these insights together in a comparative appraisal and derive a causative explanation detracts from the impact of his promising analysis of an important participant in welfare policy arena.

Richard A. Brisbin, Jr.
West Virginia University