Aug 11
I participated on a panel on “national security surveillance after Snowden” at the ABA annual meeting in Boston on June 8. The panel was organized by the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Learn more about the panel. Here is an ABA write-up of the session. I drew mainly on the background notes for my talks on transparency in New Zealand and Australia in May.
In the June 2 issue of The Nation, Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk write an essay on the state of democracy that discusses The Logic of Discipline and several other books. “There are three principal reasons for democracy’s deepening crisis of legitimacy,” write Meaney and Mounk. “The first is rooted in what Alasdair Roberts has called the ‘logic of discipline,’ which refers to the strictures that the draftsmen of global capitalism introduced into the blueprints of national governments during the past three decades.” Read the essay.
Here is the last annual report for the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service, completed in May 2014. Unfortunately Suffolk University closed the Center on July 31, 2014, for financial reasons. We are proud of the Center’s accomplishments since its establishment in 2007. Some personnel details have been redacted from this version of the report.
Public Sector, the magazine of New Zealand’s Institute of Public Administration, has published excerpts from my May lecture on Technocrats or populists: Who gained influence during the Global Financial Crisis? Read the article.
I’ve just finished a review of “Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940,” by Daniel Ernst. The review is forthcoming in Public Administration Review. Read the review.
My review of The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar has just been published on Early View for Public Administration Review. I focus on the way in which this technological shock shaped American government. “The current fashion is to emphasize the ways in which ideology and institutional inertia constrain the governmental response to such shocks. But Wolmar tells a different story. In the long run, The Great Railroad Revolution suggests, the governmental response to this innovation was pragmatic, hard-headed, and flexible.” A draft of the review is also posted on SSRN.
Up Close, produced by University of Melbourne, has just posted an interview about my 2013 book The End of Protest. Listen to the interview here. Photo right: Interviewer Lynne Haultain and producer Eric van Bemmel.
I’ve made some final adjustments to my Large Forces monograph. Get it here or on my SSRN page.
I spoke with Radio New Zealand’s Wallace Chapman on May 25 about government secrecy. The interview was broadcast on RNZ’s Sunday Morning program. Listen to the interview on the web. Australia’s ABC Radio National also broadcast my interview with Jonathan Green on May 25. The interview, about The End of Protest, was part of Radio National’s Sunday Extra program. Listen to the interview on the web.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
