International Library of Essays in Law and Society – serie

What are the consequences when law's stories and images migrate from the courtroom to the court of public opinion and from movie, television and computer screens back to electronic monitors inside the courtroom itself? What happens when lawyers and public relations experts market notorious legal cases and controversial policy issues as if they were just another commodity? What is the appropriate relationship between law and digital culture in virtual worlds on the Internet? In addressing these cutting edge issues, the essays in this volume shed new light on the current status and future fate of law, truth and justice in our time.

Whilst immigration policy is a highly controversial topic in the West, states continue to receive people who settle, whether as asylum-seekers or refugees, or as family members of existing migrants or labour migrants. Many who move violate the immigration rules either in entering a country or staying beyond the time allowed. The problems illegality entails for migrants shape much of the law and society scholarship in this area and this volume brings together the key articles which shape current thinking. The main topics covered include illegality, mercy and the language of deservingness; transnationality; family and identity; refugees and asylum-seekers.

Scores of works have made important contributions to the study of courts and judges but far fewer are sufficiently powerful to alter perspectives about entire areas of study. The articles in this volume do just that. They are, to be sure, a rather diverse set covering four substantive concerns - judicial selection and retention, judicial decision making, constraints on judicial power and the role of courts in democracies - but all have played crucial roles in shaping or changing the way we think about courts and judges.

This volume consists of nineteen previously-published articles written by leading international scholars on various aspects of law and religion. The volume looks at law and religion in the context of political power, covering different religions including Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It examines through a diversity of perspectives the law in religion and religion in law, enabling readers to gain multi-disciplinary insights into pressing contemporary issues.

This book brings together articles by leading international scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives who focus on the legal, social and cultural dimensions of intellectual properties - including patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and rights of publicity. These articles employ a creatively eclectic approach to the study of intellectual property law and policy viewed through the lenses of traditional doctrinal analysis, historical perspectives, critical cultural study, and empirical examinations of intellectual property in action. The volume also directs critical attention to the significance of intellectual property in contemporary processes of globalization and political economy.

The work of both socio-legal scholars and specialists working in social movements research continues to contribute to our understanding of how law relates to and informs the politics of social movements. In the 1990s, an important line of new research, most of it initiated by those working in the law and society tradition, began to bridge the gaps between these two areas of scholarship. This work includes new approaches to group ’legal mobilization’ politics; analysis of the judicial impact on social reform struggles; studies of individual legal mobilization in civil disputing and an almost entirely new area of research in ’cause lawyering’. It brings together the best of this research introduced by a detailed essay by the editor.

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 collects new, high-quality scholarship on the perennially controversial institution of trial by jury. The book provides accounts of the jury's historical development and contemporary use, as well as empirical work on jury selection, jury decision making and jury reform.

Contemporary law and government are increasingly characterized by a focus on risk. Fields such as health, psychiatry, criminal justice, vehicle safety, urban design and environmental governance all provide examples of settings in which problems are dealt with as risks. While risk has become more prominent, there have also been changes in the nature of risk techniques deployed. Whereas welfare states provided many services through socialized risk - such as social insurances covering health, employment and old age - increasing emphasis is now placed on individual risk management arrangements such as private insurance. In this environment, the positive side of risk has also been made more salient. Enterprise, innovation and risk-taking have become qualities valued, or even required, of current governance. In this volume, the most influential examinations and interpretations of this major trend have been brought together, in order to make clear the range and diversity, the spread and penetration of risk in contemporary societies.

Taking a broad view of social theory, this book demonstrates the importance of this theory for the study of contemporary law. Through studies of the work of Weber, Durkheim, Gurvitch, Habermas, Luhmann, Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault, Schmitt, Neumann and others, the essays address such fundamental topics as the changing forms of regulation, law's relations with morals and beliefs, law and democracy and prospects for the rule of law in the context of globalisation.

The ability to effectively manage interpersonal and intergroup conflict has never seemed more important or more relevant to current societal problems than it does today. This volume assembles articles on one of the most important emerging ideas in the social psychology of conflict management - procedural justice. Procedural justice research suggests that people's reactions to conflict resolution decisions in social settings are strongly influenced by their evaluations of the fairness of the procedures used to create rules and make decisions. Procedural justice is found to be particularly important when people are reacting to decisions made by third party authorities. These findings suggest an approach to managing conflicts and exercising authority that has proven to be effective in a wide variety of settings, ranging from mediating interpersonal conflicts to gaining acceptance for legislative decisions and judicial rulings. The articles in this volume explore the range of procedural justice effects, as well as trying to understand why procedural justice has the powerful influences observed in research. An introductory essay provides a framework for understanding the implications of procedural justice research for the fields of social psychology, management, law and politics.

Prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the legal system. Their decisions have significant implications for how crime is defined, who is charged, and the punishment they receive. This volume draws together classic and recent scholarship that critically examines how prosecutorial power is constituted through their decision-making processes, the relationships between legal changes and court actors, and the consequences of this for society. Taken as a whole, this collection offers insights into law in action, how social change shapes the legal system, and alternative forms of case resolution.

Democracy and the rule of law are commonly represented as complementary and indispensable components of the modern democratic state. Whatever the truth of this formulation, it conceals the competing claims of electoral and legal accountability that are the subject of this volume. Political, legal and social theorists have long debated these contending claims. Recent socio-legal scholarship has shed empirical light on the debate. Accordingly, this volume brings together some of the landmarks of the relevant theory, including the work of such scholars as H.L.A. Hart, Lon L. Fuller and Philip Selznick and incorporates current socio-legal scholarship by such leading figures as Malcolm Feeley, Robert Kagan, Michael McCann and David Nelken.

This important volume examines rights from an inter-disciplinary law and society perspective, beginning with the premise that the most basic functions of rights requires the empirical study of rights consciousness and claiming behavior. As such the volume includes articles and essays by political scientists, historians, lawyers, and sociologists which place the study of ordinary citizens' understandings of rights, and what actions they take based on that knowledge, at the forefront of an empirical research agenda. This has important implications for law's capacity to achieve social change and can lead to better understanding of how rights can and should operate in a social and legal system. The volume is organized around the social movements and political processes which give rise to rights, the processes by which people come to understand they enjoy a right, the decision to invoke the right either formally or informally, and the organizational and institutional constraints and opportunities for exercising rights.

The legal system relies on social science for answers to many tough questions. Social scientists study issues relevant to law. But are law and social science talking past one another? This collection of important articles and essays explores the difficult process of translation between these two fields, drawing on three different scholarly perspectives - the 'insider' approach which views social science as a tool that lawyers can use for legal ends, the 'outsider' approach of the law and society or sociology of law movement, and the study of the language of law. Each section of the volume combines theoretical articles with specific empirical examples, ranging from the death penalty through anti-discrimination law to family violence.

Race, Law and Society draws together some of the very best writing on race and racism from the law and society tradition, yet it is not intended to merely reprint the greatest hits of the past. Instead, from its introduction to its selection of articles, this anthology is designed as a 'how-to manual', a guide for scholars and students seeking templates for their own work in this important but also tricky area. Race, Law and Society pulls together leading exemplars of the sorts of social science scholarship on race, society and law that will be essential to racial progress as the world begins to travel the twenty-first century.

Intellectual property has become a dominant feature of our knowledge based economy in recent years, but how has property rights in intangible items developed? This book brings together for the first time exemplary scholarship with diverse approaches to the history of United States intellectual property protection, including trade secrets, trademark, copyright, and patent law. These articles, written by leading experts in the field and often challenging conventional narratives, underscore the importance of historical perspectives for understanding how an extensive, evolving framework for the regulation of knowledge emerged in the modern period. By tracing intellectual property from an historical perspective - not merely providing justifications in philosophy or economics in the abstract - this book draws upon the past to address contemporary debates over such varied topics as: access to knowledge; policing copyright infringement; whether employees should own the products of their minds; the role of national borders in an age of digital information; and the very future of intellectual property as stakeholders and consumers contest the extent of its legal protection.

Ethnographies of law are historically associated with anthropology and the study of far-away places and people. In contrast, this volume underscores the importance of ethnographic research in analyzing law in all societies, particularly complex developed nations. By exploring recent ethnographic research by socio-legal scholars across a range of disciplines, the volume highlights how an ethnographic approach helps in appreciating the realities of legal pluralism, the subtle contradictions in any legal system and how legal meaning is constantly reproduced on the ground through the cultural frames and practices of peoples' everyday lives.

Taking a broad view of social theory, this book demonstrates the importance of this theory for the study of contemporary law. Through studies of the work of Weber, Durkheim, Gurvitch, Habermas, Luhmann, Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault, Schmitt, Neumann and others, the essays address such fundamental topics as the changing forms of regulation, law's relations with morals and beliefs, law and democracy and prospects for the rule of law in the context of globalisation.

Prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the legal system. Their decisions have significant implications for how crime is defined, who is charged, and the punishment they receive. This volume draws together classic and recent scholarship that critically examines how prosecutorial power is constituted through their decision-making processes, the relationships between legal changes and court actors, and the consequences of this for society. Taken as a whole, this collection offers insights into law in action, how social change shapes the legal system, and alternative forms of case resolution.

This volume consists of nineteen previously-published articles written by leading international scholars on various aspects of law and religion. The volume looks at law and religion in the context of political power, covering different religions including Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It examines through a diversity of perspectives the law in religion and religion in law, enabling readers to gain multi-disciplinary insights into pressing contemporary issues.

In this volume of essays by leading socio-legal scholars, the dual concepts of consciousness and ideology are examined and used to expose law’s presence and power in social life. Rejecting the association between ideology and concealment, each essay explores the ways in which ideology and consciousness artfully produce truth, creating both power and the grounds of its resistance. The rich empirical studies included in this volume are crucial to our understanding of law, consciousness and ideology.