The implementation of social policy through law is an interactive process involving government agencies, regulated organizations, and interest groups. Implementation is the design of government policy, the choice and administration of policy instruments for social purposes, and the management of government policy in a complex and politicized environment. Although implementation is involved in practically all of the socially significant and troublesome problems of law in the modern state, our grasp of the process is partial and fragmentary.I Thus, this Article has two main purposes: development and presentation of a general model of implementation, and examination of some implications of that model for public policy, research about law, and changing conceptions of law and lawyers within "postmodern" law (regulatory law dominated by interest-group politics). Contrary to its relatively abstract connotations, something very concrete is meant by the word "model." ' 2 A model is a specific description of the actors and interactions involved in a process at a sufficient level of generality that common patterns can be recognized across a wide variety of substantive areas. When discussing the implications of a general model it is essential to establish the facts from which the implications are drawn. Too much theory about law is incomprehensible-a tedious series of abstractions and abstractions about abstractions. Hopefully, the model in this Article will not fall victim to this problem, but instead will provide dozens of concrete examples for the subsequent discussion of implications. Indeed, some of the implications are almost inseparable from the model because they involve how we visualize the operation of the legal process. Another unfortunate connotation of the word model should be addressed at the very beginning. Model sounds strange and artificial, something understood by social "scientists" rather than citizens, lawyers, politicians, and judges. The model presented in this Article, however, should be instinctively familiar to any reasonably sophisticated observer of, or participant in, the modern legal system. In a sense, the purpose of this Article is to harmonize some of the formal constructs of jurisprudence, legal research, and policy analysis with practical aspects of the modem legal process. The basic patterns described here-regulation and the politics of regulation-arose no later than the turn of the century and reached early maturity in the New Deal, but many of our formal ideas have not progressed. If this were a historical article, it would be about the lag between legal culture and legal reality. Yet, culture is powerful. Things that we know instinctively can seem surprising, even shocking, when explicitly compared with preconceptions, ideologies, and rationalizations.
