From
The Law and Politics Book ReviewVol. 8 No. 4 (April 1998) pp. 443.
Response by Bradley C. Canon and Charles A. Johnson to the review of their book, JUDICIAL POLICIES: IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT.
As assistant professors, we occasionally wrote reviews of manuscripts complaining that the author had not written the article we would have written on the topic. With the perspective that maturity brought, we stopped writing those kind of reviews, realizing that we should consider manuscripts on the basis of the author’s intentions rather than impose our own goals on them.
Professor Stephen Wasby’s review of our book Judicial Policies: Implementation and Impact, 2nd Ed. (1999) reminds us of our early manuscript reviews. Clearly, he had a different book in mind when he evaluated our book a few weeks ago (LPBR, Vol. 8, issue 11, pp. 405-408). Professor Wasby does capture our intent in preparing the second edition when he begins by saying "this book continues to be a fine synthesis of public law literature on the impact of judicial rulings.…" Our primary purpose in updating our volume was to include new research and to provide contemporary illustrations in discussing the
implementation and impact of judicial decisions. Thus, for example, the second edition includes a through treatment of the abortion decision, a focused discussion of the "new judicial federalism," a discussion of new research on Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and police interrogation, extensive reviews of new work on secondary groups (especially Congress and the public), and a sophisticated analysis of Rosenberg’s thesis of judicial impotence. With these and other new elements added, Professor Wasby’s summary comment suggested that we achieved our objective in preparing the second edition.
We encourage Professor Wasby to write the book he seems to have in mind addressing the broader research he believes should be considered in the judicial implementation and impact subfield. New issues and additional literature are certainly welcome, but they were beyond the second edition’s intended scope. Presumably, Professor Wasby’s book will tell its readers that Canon and Johnson (1999) serves as a starting point for its discussion.