"Today's hearings will focus on the process by which the Federal judiciary and Congress go about promulgating Federal Rules of Practice and Procedure. As our witnesses will describe in greater detail later in the hearing, the method by which rules are promulgated is generically called the Rules Enabling Act. These various statutes taken together constitute in part the delegation of congressional authority to the judiciary. Congress has provided that certain types of rules may be made effective in the Federal courts if they are issued by the Supreme Court and, in essence, not vetoed by the Congress. The basic outlines of this process are the same today as they were when first passed in 1934. In the intervening nearly 50 years, there has never been a comprehensive congressional review of the rulemaking process"--Page 1

This groundbreaking book contributes to an emerging literature that examines responses to the rights revolution that unfolded in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Using original archival evidence and data, Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang identify the origins of the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law in the first Reagan Administration. They then measure the counterrevolution's trajectory in the elected branches, court rulemaking, and the Supreme Court, evaluate its success in those different lawmaking sites, and test key elements of their argument. Finally, the authors leverage an institutional perspective to explain a striking variation in their results: although the counterrevolution largely failed in more democratic lawmaking sites, in a long series of cases little noticed by the public, an increasingly conservative and ideologically polarized Supreme Court has transformed federal law, making it less friendly, if not hostile, to the enforcement of rights through lawsuits.