Riaz Tejani - Böcker

Law and Society Today is a problem-oriented survey of sociolegal studies, with a unique emphasis on recent historical and political developments. Whereas other texts focus heavily on criminal procedure, this book foregrounds the significant changes of the 2000s and 2010s, including neoliberalism, migration, multiculturalism, and the large influence of law and economics in law teaching, policy debates, and judicial decision-making.Each chapter presents key concepts, real-world applications, and hypothetical problems that allow students to test comprehension. With an integrated approach to theory and practice and written in an accessible tone, this text helps students recognize the dynamic forces that shape the way the law is constructed and implemented, particularly how law drives social inequality.

American law schools are in deep crisis. Enrollment is down, student loan debt is up, and the profession's supply of high-paying jobs is shrinking. Meanwhile, thousands of graduates remain underemployed while the legal needs of low-income communities go substantially unmet. Many blame overregulation and seek a "free" market to solve the problem, but this has already been tested. Seizing on a deregulatory policy shift at the American Bar Association, private equity financiers established the first for-profit law schools in the early 2000s with the stated mission to increase access to justice by "serving the underserved". Pursuing this mission at a feverish rate of growth, they offered the promise of professional upward mobility through high-tech, simplified teaching and learning. In Law Mart, a vivid ethnography of one such environment, Riaz Tejani argues that the rise of for-profit law schools shows the limits of a market-based solution to American access to justice. Building on theories in law, political economy, and moral anthropology, Tejani reveals how for-profit law schools marketed themselves directly to ethnoracial and socioeconomic "minority" communities, relaxed admission standards, increased diversity, shook up established curricula, and saw student success rates plummet. They contributed to a dramatic rise in U.S. law student debt burdens while charging premium tuition financed up-front through federal loans over time. If economic theories have so influenced legal scholarship, what happens when they come to shape law school transactions, governance, and oversight? For students promised professional citizenship by these institutions, is there a need for protections that better uphold institutional quality and sustainability? Offering an unprecedented glimpse of this landscape, Law Mart is a colorful foray into these essential questions.

This book examines the contemporary significance of the Law and Economics movement.Drawing on anthropology, sociology, political economy, and ethics, the book traces the influence of lawyer-economists in developing and operationalizing key ideas—for instance human capital and structural adjustment—that have come to be grouped under the heading of “neoliberalism”. It then examines how these ideas are tied to global environmental harm and to wealth inequality. Largely because of such ties, sociolegal studies tend to dismiss economic thought. This book, however, forges a path between economic and sociolegal approaches. Discussing thinkers such as Foucault and Polanyi, Calabresi and Sunstein, it demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations inherent in economistic approaches to law. Bringing together disparate and sometimes conflicting literatures, the book thereby eschews disciplinary taboos in the name of a creative, sympathetic, and critical rereading of the key ideas of Law and Economics.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in sociolegal studies, anthropology, sociology, and economics.

This book examines the contemporary significance of the Law and Economics movement.Drawing on anthropology, sociology, political economy, and ethics, the book traces the influence of lawyer-economists in developing and operationalizing key ideas—for instance human capital and structural adjustment—that have come to be grouped under the heading of “neoliberalism”. It then examines how these ideas are tied to global environmental harm and to wealth inequality. Largely because of such ties, sociolegal studies tend to dismiss economic thought. This book, however, forges a path between economic and sociolegal approaches. Discussing thinkers such as Foucault and Polanyi, Calabresi and Sunstein, it demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations inherent in economistic approaches to law. Bringing together disparate and sometimes conflicting literatures, the book thereby eschews disciplinary taboos in the name of a creative, sympathetic, and critical rereading of the key ideas of Law and Economics.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in sociolegal studies, anthropology, sociology, and economics.