“Jenkins and Patashnik have brought together a first-rate collection of scholars to address the too-often-neglected question of what happens to American public policies after the passage of legislation. The result is a compelling work that raises many deeper questions about legislation as a developmental force in American politics. Living Legislation will make an extremely important contribution to the study of American politics and public policy.”

Robert C. Lieberman, Columbia University

“Living Legislation offers an important new perspective on policy making in the United States. In bringing together leading scholars from a variety of research traditions, this agenda-setting book shifts our attention from the enactment of landmark bills towards the broader question of what leads some legislative achievements to endure while others are reversed or fade away.”

Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley

“The questions addressed by this diverse and formidable group of scholars are of such obvious importance that it is amazing so little work has been done on them until recently. Readers will come away impressed both with the progress made in understanding what happens to laws and policies after they are enacted as well as the pressing need for future work on the topic. Living Legislation is sure to be a high-impact volume.”

Frances E. Lee, University of Maryland

"This collection of essays pushes the frontiers of knowledge about lawmaking in the US."

Choice

“In this illuminating volume, Jenkins and Patashnik bring together an all-star cast of American politics scholars to analyze the origins and development of legislation over time. . . . The essays make a strong case for looking ‘beyond legislative productivity’ to the broader politics of agenda-setting and programmatic evolution that bracket the formal lawmaking process. . . . [This is] an admirable volume that extends our understanding of how public policies emerge and evolve. . . .  The chapters are uniformly excellent, showcasing a diverse array of ingenious approaches to answering important questions about the policy process. Both quantitative and qualitative scholars will find much to ponder and debate within its pages.”

Perspectives on Politics

“Jenkins and Patashnik have assembled an ambitious volume that seeks to take American legislative scholarship beyond its typical focus only on the making of laws to consider what happens to laws over the course of their ‘lives’. . . . An impressive array of scholars from law, economics, public policy, and especially political science wrestle with various aspects of this broad topic. . . . The timely focus on understudied and underappreciated facets of legislation make for an interesting, insightful read.”

Journal of Legislative Studies