Vol. 5 No. 9 (September, 1995) pp. 228-230
THE LAW AND SOCIETY READER by Richard L. Abel (editor). New York:
New York University Press, 1995. 450 pp. Cloth $55.00. Paper
$20.00.
Reviewed by Samuel Krislov, Department of Political Science,
University of Minnesota
When the Law and Society Association was in its infancy, the
trustees would meet in someone's hotel room at someone else's
convention. I went to economics, psychology, sociology and
anthropology meetings that way. Our perennial subjects at our
cuckoo's nest deliberations were raising money and keeping the
Law & Society Review going. We had perpetual differences with
our amiable publisher, a clash of two cultures. Ultimately, the
publishers proposed taking over the review guaranteeing very
generous terms. They apparently thought they had made an offer no
sensible individual would refuse. But to a person the trustees
agreed that the review was our primary responsibility, that
financial risk was unimportant, that the review was the road to
any viable organizational future. And so it proved to be.
When I was asked to review Abel s Law and Society reader, I
assumed I would be taking a walk through memory lane, reliving
some of those early years and the evolution of The Review since
then. Alas, that is not to be, for the reader is a different kind
of volume. There are, of course, myriad strategies of selection
from thirty years of a rich and variegated journal. Abel's
strategy has not been to select landmark articles for their own
sake, but rather to assemble a highly useful and surprisingly
well integrated classroom volume developing a small set of themes
through generous abridgment of eighteen articles culled from the
review. An introduction and discussion questions are added as
apparatus to help integrate the volume. The themes chosen by Abel
are:
1. "Disputing" with four articles dealing with the
nature of disputes, perceptions by participants, and the macro
uses of law;
2. "Social Control" with another four pieces on
punishment and control mechanisms;
3. "Norm Creation" with one piece on criminal and
another dealing with civil processes;
4. "Regulation" with pieces on organizational
buttressing of court decisions;
5. "Equality" including race and gender considerations
and Marc Galanter s "Why the Haves Came Out Ahead,"
probably the most celebrated piece in Review history;
6. "Ideas and Consciousness;"
7. "The legal profession."
The topics and the selections reflect rather personal approaches.
The editing is generous and largely catholic in taste and done in
collaboration with, and the permission of the primary authors so
that the selections convey the originals extremely well. However,
Abel clearly preferred articles featuring on the one hand
individual level anthropological and psychological foci and on
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the other system-wide social inferences, as would be expected by
those familiar with his training, work, and commitments.
Even with articles involving "middle-range social mechanisms
and with an empirical focus, Abel has, as noted in his
introductory comments, drastically or completely eliminated
graphs and tables except in the article by Radelet and Pierce on
race discrimination in prosecution where inclusion of evidence
was of course unavoidable. The result is a volume heavy in
"neo-ethnographic" method with lots of carefully
manicured quotes, including frequent "uh's",
"yeah's ' and "ok s" but devoid of solid evidence.
Those of us of the "for instance is not proof school"
of law and society will not be totally happy with this volume as
a teaching tool, but its $20 price makes it a great candidate for
supplementation with other volumes and/or reprinted articles of a
quantitative sort.
Political scientists will require especially strong
supplementation, for many of our standard topics are omitted. In
a provocative introduction, Abel indicates he is interested in
all aspects of the law except those involving rules. This
paradoxical approach extends to court structures and formal (and
to a large extent informal) relationships among the official
participants in the legal system. Judicial selection and indeed
career lines of such officials is not covered, nor is any of the
literature on decision-making. Some of those gaps flow from the
work's core orientation, some an obvious product of a desire to
keep down the size of the volume to reasonable proportions.
There are other costs to the decision to go for classroom use as
well. The majority of articles are from the period of 1986-1990.
Galanter's 1975 article is the earliest one chosen, so that
relatively current material is proffered. As a result, many
classic articles like Friedman's "A Tale of Two
Counties," "Blumberg's "The Practice of Law as a
Confidence Game," or Massel's less celebrated article on
Social Control in Mongolian Russia are not represented. Nor are
some themes characteristically associated with the review even
mentioned. For example the historical evolution of legal issues
(a literature developed out of discussion of Friedman's work),
the case-load and social conditions literature, the compliance
with court decisions literature are just some topics not
represented here. Of course, more coverage would weaken the
coherence which is the reader's greatest asset.
Only with respect to the selection on community control do I feel
that an obviously stronger article would easily have been found
in the pages of the Review. In two other instances I suspect that
coverage of an article won a marginal decision over quality. As
to the rest it is obvious that when Abel with his own strong
contributions to the study of the legal profession felt he could
only print one piece on that topic (albeit a fine contribution by
Sarat and Felstiner) we get a glimpse of the restraints imposed
by this kind of project.
One thing Abel manages well and it conforms with his personal
exhortations is to make the volume multi-cultural. About a third
of the material is non-U.S.-focused. Apparently he was not able
to find much suitable for this volume on Africa which no
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doubt reflects weaknesses of the review and our crowd, rather
than his own training and concerns.
This volume represents a very considerable contribution to
classroom teaching particularly at the advanced and graduate
levels. There has been a slowing down of the publication of such
volumes in recent years and many such efforts have gone out of
print. It is therefore doubly welcome especially at so reasonable
a cost in the paperback form.
In some ways this is a less valuable work for scholars than some
of the early volumes on law and society with only eighteen
contributions and a lot of space devoted to didactic purposes,
but it is also unusually faithful in its editing (except as noted
on the empirical evidence dimension) and therefore may prove
useful to those who wish to gain a first impression of whole
studies rather than snippets dealing with culled arguments and
particularized details. It was obviously a labor of love and the
NYU press, the Law and Society Association, the contributors and
above all Rick Abel have all obviously extended themselves
unselfishly to make it possible.
Copyright 1995