Federal Service and the Constitution: The Development of the Public Employment Relationship

The first edition of David Rosenbloom's Federal Service and the Constitution was a landmark study of how the US federal employment relationship evolved from the founding of the country to the book's publication in 1971. The book was a history and current legal analysis of how the bureaucracy changed from a system completely dominated by political appointees who were hired and fired at the will of their political masters to a largely professional and apolitical civil service who have legal protections. Today, do federal employees have special legal status, with more rights in some areas and less in others, or are their rights much the same as employees in the private sector? The federal employment relationship is an ongoing evolution, and many court cases and developments in society at large since 1971 have dramatically changed the federal bureaucracy to protect and expand employment rights. At the same time, the special legal status of federal employees has eroded through Supreme Court decisions. Rosenbloom has thoroughly revised and updated this highly readable history of federal employment for the twenty-first century.