Peter Schuck Has New Book on Five Key Hard Legal and Policy Issues

schuck_peter-cropped.jpg

In One Nation Undecided, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor Emeritus of Law Peter H. Schuck analyzes five hot-button socio-legal-political issues from an objective, gimlet-eyed perspective. Each chapter of One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues That Divide Us (Princeton University Press, 2017) takes on a different “hard issue”: poverty, immigration, affirmative action, campaign finance, and religious exemptions from secular policies. Schuck presents a comprehensive and balanced analysis of these issues, explaining their historical, empirical, normative, policy, and remedial aspects and the difficult tradeoffs that solutions require.  In his introduction, he emphasizes that “clear thinking about such issues is not the same as support for specific outcomes.   In truth, I do not much care where readers come out on these issues so long as they approach them with what I have called clear thinking.”

Book cover of One Nation Undecided
On immigration, for example, Schuck carefully takes readers through the intricate history and complex policy dimensions of the topic, concluding with proposed reforms to improve enforcement effectiveness and create a legalization process that is workable, fair, and generous.  In the chapter on campaign finance, the author analyzes eight reform proposals—from overturning Citizens United to allowing free TV time to candidates to greater disclosure.  His discussion of religious exemptions from secular public policies dissects the concepts of separation, accommodation, and neutrality while working through a number of specific, socially-fraught disputes arising in the wake of the Hobby Lobby and Obergefell decisions.

“At a time of deep social and political division, along comes a much-needed book to steer us toward solutions to five very difficult national problems. There could be no better guide for this endeavor than Peter Schuck, one of the clearest and most thoughtful legal and policy scholars of this or any generation,” says Robert E. Litan, author of Trillion Dollar Economists. “Every policymaker at every level of government, and ideally every citizen, should read this book.”

Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale Law School. His major fields of teaching and research are law and policy in the administrative state; tort law; immigration, citizenship, and refugee law; groups, diversity, and law; and administrative law. He has written on a broad range of other public policy topics. His most recent books include Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (2014); and Understanding America: The Institutions and Policies that Shape America and the World (Public Affairs, 2008) (co-edited with James Q. Wilson). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a contributing editor to The American Lawyer, served as an arbitrator, expert witness, and consultant in a variety of disputes, and has testified in dozens of congressional hearings.