ABSTRACT
Adversarial legalism depends on private parties to activate the law by pursuing their individual rights and remedies. Compliance is driven from the bottom up, usually in an ad hoc way by uncoordinated litigants scattered across the polity. Regulation, the subject of this chapter, is quite different because it does not depend on either private parties or litigation to mobilize the law. Regulation is centralized—this is why it falls under the category of “bureaucratic legalism” in Robert Kagan’s typology—so that regulatory officials have complete control over enforcement. They can deploy the law strategically using a variety of tactics, many less combative and resource-intensive than litigation.
