In most countries, bureaucratic agencies handle regulatory enforcement. But the United States does things differently. Embedded in statutes governing consumer protection, antitrust, employment, civil rights, and the environment are more than 10,000 "private rights of action"—legal provisions that empower ordinary citizens and their lawyers to enforce the law through lawsuits. This is how Americans regulate everything from wage theft to air pollution to corporate fraud.

  How Americans Enforce the Law tells the story of this distinctively American approach to governance. Diego Zambrano reveals that private enforcement is not a modern innovation but an inherited tradition dating to medieval English "penal statutes" that colonial America adopted and intensified. The book traces how this system evolved through critical junctures and was boosted by twentieth-century procedural innovations like broad discovery rules and class actions that transformed scattered statutory clauses into a mass-litigation engine.

  This is the first comprehensive account of private enforcement's origins, operations, and future. Offering both celebration and critique, Zambrano shows why private enforcement works well in employment law, for instance, but has been weaponized in environmental law. He creates a framework for determining when this uniquely American form of governance serves the public interest, and when it can be used to undermine democracy.