Law, policymaking, and the policy process: closing the gaps

Public policy scholars and public law scholars often study the same substantive issues and have similar theoretical interests. Yet students of the public policy process rarely consider the courts as policymakers in the same manner as do their public law counterparts. We seek to explain this difference in approaches between the two subfields on the question of the courts as policymakers, and we ask how models of the public policy process should incorporate the judiciary.