This article is an essay about the meaning of "law and public policy" and the complicated relationship between these two ideas. There is hardly a term more common in government than "policy"-public policy, policy analysis, and so forth. Especially since the advent of legal realism, legal discourse relies extensively upon "policy arguments," referring to something both powerful and peripheral to the meaning of text. Governments pass laws and use them to effectuate policies. The article also serves as the analytical framework for a course I developed in Law and Public Policy. In order to prepare the course materials, I had to define the subject and distinguish it from that of other courses; for example, why not simply teach a set of interesting topics in constitutional law and theory? Or, if policy has something to do with legal impact and sociolegal institutions, why not teach a standard course in sociology of law or law and economics? Some of the distinctive content of Law and Public Policy can be condensed as follows. Policy seemed to be the dominant and relatively recent concepthaving something to do with the material welfare of large numbers of people. Policy in this sense is the framework for modem free market economies and modem welfare states that regulate economic production, consumption, and exchange. Most law in modem states responds to the needs and consequences of vast, dynamic and autonomous economic infrastructures and systems. And modem legal institutions tend to assume a characteristic form, stable over time, functionally autonomous, a delicate balance between central guidance and decentralized action. As the child of social engineering in welfare states, law and public policy seems built upon a series of tensions and contradictions: central steering through decentralized action; the melding of the public and private sectors; the focus of policy on future consequences coupled with the law's reference to historical text; sophisticated social engineering lacking adequate means to deal with elusive human behaviors; fine-tuned policies emerging from a disorderly political system and disturbed by a sense of crisis, contradiction and disorder; and a proliferation of disciplinary accretions and interdisciplinary activities without a clear paradigm for research. Yet for all these conflicting trends a common theme also exists: the emergence of empowerment as a model for designing policies in many different areas. These ideas will be explored further in the rest of this essay. When I say "map of an area," I am trying to suggest both the content and intellectual structure of this enormous enterprise. I discuss ideas and refer to scholarship not so much to fully explicate or precisely document them, but rather to sketch and begin connecting the main elements of a complete picture. In some ways, this is very challenging and very abstract, an exercise in meta-analysis. Yet, the ultimate purpose is also both specific and personal. Ideas about law and public policy are the common currency of a large part of our society and the universe of legal academic discourse. Since law school I have found this discourse, this universe, disconcertingly enormous, dynamic, expansive, fragmented, and chaotic (as though the modem economy is the "big bang" of social and economic life). The effort to simplify, clarify, and illuminate such a universe seems well worthwhile.
