Political science scholarship does not give US Attorneys (federal prosecutors) enough attention. These important players are at the heart of core political, policy, and legal dynamics in American government. Like few other actors, their work traverses the separation-of-powers structure: they are executive branch appointees who prosecute cases involving violations of federal laws (passed by Congress and subject to oversight) in federal courts. Thus, their policy-making and enforcement roles and impacts are significant. Avenues for studying them using political science theory and empirical analysis are plentiful in principle, yet scarce in practice.

The Politics of Federal Prosecution seeks to contribute new knowledge to our understanding of US Attorneys in American politics, including their history in government (chap. 2), appointment and tenure (chaps. 3 and 4), and political influences (e.g., imposed by the president and Congress) on prosecutorial decision making (chaps 5–8). In adding to a scant political science literature on US Attorneys, this well-written book makes some important contributions that are highly relevant to literatures in judicial, executive branch, and legislative politics. However, some parts of the book leave the reader with a lack of clarity on what its theoretical and empirical contributions are relative to past work.

Chapter 2 provides compelling insights into the history of US Attorneys’ “place” in government, ranging from a diffuse, decentralized governmental presence with varying principals for much of the nineteenth century to a more centralized role housed within the Department of Justice and under the political control of the Attorney General and ultimately the president. US Attorney bureaucratization tracked an expanding Department of Justice tasked with being the chief federal law enforcer. US Attorneys’ offices around the country play a significant role in the law enforcement process.

Chapters 3 (on selection) and 4 (departures and removals) generate some interesting insights and contributions. Chapter 3 advances hypotheses and empirical analyses explaining Senate confirmation delay and failure. Ideological distance between the president and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair influences both delay and failure. The blue-slip process and presidential approval influence delay. Other political environment variables (Judiciary chair–federal district court distance and president–court distance), local considerations, and nominee characteristics have null effects. I was hoping to see some basic statistics on the effect of divided government (which is proxied by the president–Judiciary chair distance variable) on both outcomes and more discussion on whether confirmation processes for US Attorneys are susceptible to the same partisan forces faced by higher-profile presidential nominations, such as judges and certain cabinet officials.

Chapter 4’s descriptive presentation is quite useful and insightful. The authors shed light on average tenure in office and how US Attorneys depart from office. For instance, the authors highlight that (1) many presidents do not prioritize new US Attorney appointments, typically appointing replacements well into the first year of their presidency, and (2) US Attorneys customarily submit their resignations when a new president takes office, but some serve as “holdovers” until the president’s nominees are confirmed. I was surprised to see that this chapter did not engage more directly with chapter 7 of Banks Miller and Brett Curry’s book (U.S. Attorneys, Political Control, and Career Ambition, 2019), which contains a systematic theoretical and empirical analysis of departures—and whether US Attorneys seek to satisfy principals with whom they may eventually land future jobs. The chapter would also be enhanced by providing a more rigorous empirical analysis (as in chapter 3) and comparing and contrasting results with those of Miller and Curry so that the reader can understand the scope and context of the empirical contribution to the literature.

The last half of the book advances a theoretical framework (chap. 5) and three sets of empirical analyses (chaps. 6–8) of the impact of external political influence on prosecutorial decision making. The work draws largely on theory and political influences posited by past works, namely the earlier mentioned Miller and Curry book (2019), as well as Andrew Whitford and Jeff Yates’s article, “Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs” (Journal of Politics, 65, 2003), and 2009 book, Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda. Like those works, Boyd and coauthors adapt principal-agent theory, noting that US Attorneys face political constraints from competing principals—the president (their executive branch superior) and Congress (via legislative oversight). Following both Whitford and Yates, and Miller and Curry, the authors posit that presidential rhetoric and congressional hearings are instruments of political control that influence prosecutorial decision making, particularly in the area of violent crime. The authors also posit the influence of local public opinion on prosecutorial decision making. More engagement (comparisons and contrasts) with these prior works is necessary for fully fleshing out the book’s theoretical contributions.

The next two chapters present empirical analyses of the decision to prosecute (chap. 6) and charging and bargaining processes (chap. 7). The authors analyze violent crime data from 1996–2011 but do not necessarily contextualize or situate this issue area relative to the universe of the prosecutorial workload. That has implications for how well their argument travels to other issue areas (generalizability). The authors decline to differentiate their approach from Miller and Curry’s examination of a more comprehensive set of issues (immigration, narcotics, terrorism, weapons, and white-collar crime) over a longer time (1986–2015), which provided leverage to examine the differential effects of political factors across different issue domains. Moreover, although past works (Miller and Curry 2019; Whitford and Yates 2003) use the district-year as the unit of analysis and rely on aggregate, district-level measures, Boyd and coauthors’ units of analysis are cases. Although that approach may be valuable relative to past work, the authors do not explain why. Once again, the research designs and empirical analyses would benefit from more sustained engagement with past works to distinguish the book’s empirical contribution to the literature.

Presidential rhetoric and congressional hearings influence the decision to prosecute, whereas local public opinion does not (chap. 6). Effects of some “control variables”—the violent crime rate, local punitiveness, and partisanship of the US Attorney—are also quite interesting. Chapter 7’s dependent variables—charge dismissal and “substantial assistance departures” from federal sentencing guidelines—are interesting and more specific than past works’ dependent variables. I was hoping, however, for a little more context for their use. Presidential rhetoric constrains charge dismissal, whereas congressional hearings constrain substantial assistance departure. As in chapter 6, local public opinion has null effects.

Chapter 8 examines a very interesting topic: criminal asset forfeiture. The authors move to a more aggregate analysis, using the district-year as the unit of analysis; the dependent variable is the number of forfeitures pending in each district per year. Presidential rhetoric, congressional hearings, and local public opinion (on drugs) are found to influence forfeiture activity by US Attorneys.

In sum, Boyd, Nelson, Ostrander, and Boldt make a contribution by highlighting (1) the important role that US Attorneys play in the political system, (2) the history and evolution of that role, (3) the politics surrounding appointments and departures, and (4) the general contours surrounding political control of prosecutorial decision making in the areas of violent crime and criminal asset forfeiture. As discussed throughout the review, more engagement with some key prior works would have established the book’s scholarly contribution more clearly. A final and important contribution of the book will be its ability to spur many future scholarly inquiries into this important topic.