Susan S. Silbey - Böcker

This study explores the different ways people view the law. It identifies three common narratives: one is based on the idea of the law as magisterial and remote; another views the law as a game with rules that can be manipulated to one's advantage; and a third narrative describes the law as an arbitrary power to be actively resisted. Drawing on more than 400 extensive case studies, the text presents individual experiences interwoven with an analysis that charts a coherent theory of legality. It depicts the institution as it is lived: strange and familiar, imperfect and ordinary, and at the centre of daily life.

The conditions of contemporary life have been shaped in large part by science and technology extending human life, shrinking the globe, traveling into space. To effect human life and nature, for good or ill, enhancing safety or risk, science must be transformed by legal procedures from hypotheses and laboratory experiments into property and products. Both the legal processes and scientific practices derive legitimacy from being publicly observable and rational. Through their defining methods, both law and science attempt to constrain the use of unregulated force. Yet, despite their purportedly open and available processes, both science and legality are experienced as arcane, impenetrable, and often uninterpretable. Neither law nor science achieves the transparency to which it aspires. These two volumes collect exemplary law and society scholarship to look beneath the surface connections and antagonisms between these two powerful modern institutions. The first volume collects together articles on science as it enters legal domains, primarily as evidence and legitimation for political authority and the second explores how law acts within the domains of science, primarily as resources and regulations channeling both the practices of scientists and the consequences of scientific production.

This volume is part of an annually-published series of interdisciplinary research on law, with a critical focus. Research is invited on a wide range of law-related subjects, including law and inequality, feminist jurisprudence, racial oppression and law, and legal institutions and communities.

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family.

Marc Galanter's seminal work, "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead," is among the most well-cited law review articles of all time. With his distinction between experienced "repeat players" and inexperienced "one shotters" in the U.S. judicial system, Galanter established a clear and predictable model of how the structure of our legal system and one's frequency of interaction with it influence the outcomes of cases. This book collects the original paper and ten contemporary articles about Galanter's theory in a single volume. The articles, which present new research results and synthesize work done over the past few decades, examine the lasting influence and continued importance of this groundbreaking work. In Litigation provides a thorough presentation of the most durable theory explaining litigation and legal participation that sociolegal scholarship has produced.

Marc Galanter's seminal work, "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead," is among the most well-cited law review articles of all time. With his distinction between experienced "repeat players" and inexperienced "one shotters" in the U.S. judicial system, Galanter established a clear and predictable model of how the structure of our legal system and one's frequency of interaction with it influence the outcomes of cases. This book collects the original paper and ten contemporary articles about Galanter's theory in a single volume. The articles, which present new research results and synthesize work done over the past few decades, examine the lasting influence and continued importance of this groundbreaking work. In Litigation provides a thorough presentation of the most durable theory explaining litigation and legal participation that sociolegal scholarship has produced.

Organizational Challenges to Regulatory Enforcement and Compliance: A New Common Sense about Regulation

THE ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science September 2013, Volume 649

Special Editor: Susan S. Silbey

 

Following a series of global financial and economic crises at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we hear renewed calls for increased government regulation of the economy (including finance, banking, insurance, communications, environment, and employment) as a necessary safeguard against the excesses of exuberant capitalism.  At the same time, opponents argue that government regulation not only dampens market efficiencies and hinders economic growth in general but specifically encourages the predatory and fraudulent practices responsible for the recent Great Recession.

 

This volume of The ANNALS analyzes the bodies of scholarship on regulation as well as the empirical models and policy advice that have both fueled and responded to conventional public regulation by rethinking these paradigms from the perspective of the regulated organizations—in all their diversity and complexity. These articles examine three features of the contemporary situation that demand new ways of looking at the processes and prospects of regulation: experiences with innovative regulatory models propagated as risk management; failures of organizational self-governance; and new forms of networked and dispersed global organizations. We suggest that a new common sense about regulation acknowledges the ubiquity of legal regulation and the contextual conditions that frame the normative interpretations, the global circulation of regulation that has transformed its scale, and finally the role of the organization as the locus of regulation.

Paperback: $35.00, Sale Price $28.00, ISBN: 978-1-4833-4508-6 Hardcover: $48.00, Sale Price $38.40, ISBN: 978-1-4833-4507-9