Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States is a deep historical and legal analysis of state police power, examining its origins in the founding period of the American public through the 20th century. The book reveals how American police power was intended to be a broad, but not unlimited, charter of regulatory governance, designed to implement key constitutional objectives and advance the general welfare. It explores police power's promise as a mechanism for implementing successful regulatory governance and tackling societal ills, while considering key structural issues like separation of powers and individual rights. This insightful book will shape understanding of the neglected state police power, a key part of constitutional governance in the U.S. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

What happens when the problems we need to regulate outpace our capacity to understand them? From generative AI and cryptocurrency to synthetic opioids, pandemics, and climate change, the twenty-first century confronts policymakers with challenges that are not merely difficult but fundamentally different in kind. These are "frontier" problems: novel issues we have never encountered in quite the same way, technologies that evolve faster than the rules meant to govern them, and crises whose damage is nearly impossible to predict in advance or contain after the fact.

This book argues that our regulatory instincts—reaching for familiar templates, fighting the last war—are poorly matched to these frontier challenges. Policymakers face a double bind, captured in the classic Collingridge dilemma: early in a technology's life, we lack the information to regulate wisely; by the time we understand its impacts, the technology is too entrenched to control. Layered on top of this are stubborn structural impediments—the incentives of regulators and the regulated, the architecture of our governing institutions, and the dense web of legal rules that shape what regulation can accomplish.

Drawing an unexpected but illuminating thread from Machiavelli's concept of fortuna—the unpredictable river of fortune that floods human affairs—the book contends that effective regulation on the frontier demands virtù: boldness, adaptability, and the courage to discard outdated frameworks. Rather than building rigid systems around confident predictions, regulators must design for resilience: adaptive rules, scenario planning, experimental sandboxes, and the strategic agility to seize moments of crisis as opportunities for overdue reform.

The book proceeds in three parts. Part I examines the foundational aims of regulation and assesses how conventional strategies perform—and where they fall short. Part II takes readers inside five of today's most vexing wicked problems: generative AI, drug policy, cryptocurrency, public health emergencies, and climate change, each illustrating a distinct dimension of the frontier challenge. Part III synthesizes these case studies into constructive frameworks and new ways of thinking about regulatory innovation.

Neither a technical manual nor a grand unified theory, this is a book for policymakers, scholars, and engaged citizens who recognize that the storms of change are coming—and who want regulatory systems built not to prevent disruption, but to withstand and channel it.