Tales from the Sausage Factory: Making Laws in New York State

A former state legislator and a political scientist team up to show how New York's legislature was once the nation's model professional legislature, and how it might recover from its present dysfunction.

"Laws are like sausages," Otto von Bismarck is said to have remarked. "It is better not to see them being made." Even among sausage factories, New York State's legislature is notoriously dysfunctional, but as Tales from the Sausage Factory reminds us, this was not always the case. Indeed, in...