From contesting the power of large corporations to nurturing a stable industrial economy, regulatory policies have been created in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Likewise, regulatory institutions have been designed to address host of administrative demands, to incorporate organized interests into the policy process, and to compensate for specific problems of implementation. One can analyze each expansion of regulatory authority as an independentevent. However, one can bring order to the history of regulation by identifying particular regimes that have emerged during critical periods in U.S. history. When used in international relations, a regime is commonly defined as “a set of principles, norms, rules, and procedures around which actors' expectations converge.” In this context, regimes are important because they “constrain and regularize the behavior of participants, affect which issues among protagonists move on and off agendas, determine which activities are legitimized or condemned, and influence whether, when, and how conflicts are resolved.” While retaining the emphasis on a value-based governance structure, we can define a regulatory regime as a linked set of policies and institutions that condition the relationship between societal interests, the state, economic actors in multiple sectors of the economy. A regime framework focuses attention on points of continuity in policy and institutional change. It facilitates the discovery of patterns in regulatory policies and institutions and provides a useful explanatory and organizational tool.

The general constitutional authority of the President to veto legislation passed by Congress has recently received renewed scholarly attention. However, few studies have focused on the pocket veto—the power to negate proposed laws sent for approval without the possibility of reconsideration—and its ramifications for presidential effectiveness. This research comprehensively investigates the creation, development, and employment of the pocket veto. First, this article will trace the history of this form of executive prerogative from colonial times through its establishment in the Constitution. Second, it will review the use of the pocket veto in the nineteenth century. Third, it will undertake a seminal empirical probe of influences on public-bill pocket-veto frequency from 1889 to 1989. Fourth, I will delineate congressional and court challenges to the use of this executive device. In the final section, I will assess the consequences of heightened consternation over pocket-veto use.

In the mid-1960s, Charles G. Sellers, Jr., was perhaps the most widely respected historian of the Jacksonian era. The author of several seminal articles on the period, he was in the midst of writing a multivolume biography of James K. Polk, two volumes of which had already appeared. Sellers's knowledge of the intricacies of Jacksonian politics, his comprehension of the importance of state politics, and his understanding of the relationship between society and politics were unrivaled. The second volume of his study of Polk received the Bancroft Prize, and Jacksonian scholars eagerly awaited the appearance of the promised third volume, covering the most crucial years of Polk's presidency.

It is not surprising that an era that saw the creation of much of the America that we know—its mass political parties, sustained capitalist growth, individualistic creed, modern labor, feminist and moral reform movements, and formalized racism—witnessed intense moral controversy. The Jacksonian period posed in its starkest form what Edmund S. Morgan has called the central “paradox” of American history—the “marriage” of slavery and freedom, each of them expanding by leaps and bounds, each doing so increasingly within its own sphere. This was a time when many Americans were seized, as never before, with an intensely self-seeking and accumulating spirit. It was also a period when Americans' collective national mission, suffused with benevolent dreams of “righteous liberty and opportunity that would surpass all worldly limits,” was frequently invoked, sometimes in support of the claims of interest and law, and other times in ways that challenged authority justified purely in terms of selfish interest, positivistic application of the law, or coercive force. All this is to say that in the epoch from the end of the War of 1812 to the eve of the Civil War, moral dispute among different groups of Americans—parties and factions, classes, races and the national minorities, vested and emerging interests, masters and slaves, men and women—was often ferocious.

While William Gienapp pushes some points further than I would, most of what he writes about Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution is well taken. For even a distinguished senior historian, present attitudes and ideologies generate the taxonomy into which the past is inserted. This is unfortunate because there is so much in Sellers's book that is incisive and instructive, particularly to someone who is not a political historian. No one to my knowledge has integrated the social and political history of the Jackson era with the story of the unmistakable “market revolution” that occurred in such a detailed, generally consistent, and enjoyable fashion.

There has been a general unwillingness in the profession to grapple seriously with the arguments of Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution. This is unfortunate, for Sellers's book demands close scrutiny because it raises important questions about the significance of the Jacksonian era, the relationship between public policy and democracy, and the fundamental purpose of history. In their helpful comments, Herbert Hovenkamp and Iver Bernstein challenge directly very few of my criticisms of the book. Silence may or may not be acquiescence, but I see no purpose in repeating my arguments. Since after several weeks of trying Sellers abandoned his attempt to write a response, readers can read his book, my critique, and Hovenkamp's and Bernstein's comments and make up their own minds.