Vol. 10 No. 2 (February 2000) pp. 152-154.

LAW IN BRIEF ENCOUNTERS by W. Michael Reisman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 225 pp. Cloth $27.50.

Reviewed by John Gilliom, Department of Political Science, Ohio University.

At a recent early morning meeting, a sociologist and I were grousing about how university administrators seem to get a special thrill out of their pre-dawn fusillades of Power Point. The staid historian seated between us deployed his haughty Cambridge accent to note: "Well, I have been up since FIVE reading The TIMES ... OF LONDON". As he leaned forward, the sociologist and I leaned back and shared that almost indescribable look that we all know and use for condemning someone who has gone snooty and high-fallutin' on us -- purse your lips, raise your eyebrows, tilt your head, roll your eyes.

Within the framework of W. Michael Reisman's LAW IN BRIEF ENCOUNTERS the historian had broken the law of casual conversation and had been sanctioned by our looks. In this way, our interactions were both drawing upon and reproducing laws regarding conversations among equals, or "rapping," as Reisman calls it. This is the realm of "microlaw", the complex system of unofficial social laws that govern our short-term and casual interactions with others -- conversations, standing in line, even just looking at someone.

In Reisman's view what makes all of this stuff "Law" is the existence of (1) norms, (2) judgments, and (3) sanctions (see p. 39 or p. 54). These features mark both state systems of law and these private and unwritten spheres of microlaw:

"We may speak here of a legal SYSTEM because we are encountering more than those imprecise yearnings, the innumerable "you oughts" and "you shoulds" that we hear and ignore every day . . . What distinguishes a microlegal system from conversations is that it has an attendant set of expectations about proper objective and subjective responses to norm violations, intimating some sort of system of enforcing the norm" (pp. 39-40)

The goals of LAW IN BRIEF ENCOUNTERS are to call our attention to and explore the workings of these systems of "microlaw" and to chastise conventional legal positivists for allowing official state law to monopolize their definitions of what law is, and to urge us all to think about microlaw and the ways that it may be changed to bring us closer to the "good life". Mechanically, the book is, for the most part, a compilation of essays that Reisman has published over the last twenty years. Although he draws on a diverse array of empirical studies, the author's own personal observations and analysis of social situations make up the central methodology of the book. The substantive chapters of the work center on detailed analysis of the systems of microlaw, sanction, and norms as they play out in everyday activities of looking at other people (Chap. 1), waiting in line (Chap. 2), or sharing a conversation (Chap. 3). Reisman is an artist at exploring the
patterns

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of microlaw at work in, say, the difference between a glance and a stare and the role of a glare as one of the sanctions that may occur when microlaw is broken. Similarly, we encounter in depth analyses of the sanctions for one who cuts in line, the laws of "savesies", and the regulation of how large of a group may join a person who has been holding a place in a long line.

These are all, Reisman argues, examples from a vast and important arena of law. It is a law that originates not in the legislature or courthouse but from within the private spheres that liberal political regimes maintain and protect. Reisman's work argues that,

"Mainstream contemporary legal theory--with is emphasis on the state as the centerpiece of any legal system and, for many theorists, its primary, if not exclusive, source of law--misdirects our attention from the full realm of law. The law of the state may be important, but law, REAL law, is found in all human relations, from the simplest, briefest encounter between two people to the most inclusive and permanent type of interaction. Law is a property of interaction. Real law is generated,
reinforced, changed and terminated continually in the course of almost all of human activity" (p. 2).

In arguing for the protection of these private spheres, Reisman urges us to be wary of state incursions into microlaw for "the abiding preference, indeed, characteristic of a liberal system is for civic order or microlegal arrangements rather than governmental regulations, because the latter require the creation of new governmental departments and government officials, perforce operating in bureaucratic mode and intervening more and more in the lives of the individual, however laudable the social goals" (p. 17). Oddly, however, despite this stated preference for keeping formal law out of the picture, he later argues that microlaw should be held up to the standards of international law -- "that the practices of all groups MUST be appraised in terms of the international code of human rights" so that "practices
inconsistent with the international standard be adjusted." (p. 158)

Now, I have a hard time disagreeing with the idea that it would be good for us all to live up to, if not beyond, the ideals of international human rights law. However, within the parameters set by this work and its celebration of the unregulated realm of microlaw, readers may be left asking for more clarification of the arguments through which Reisman comes to support the regulation of this realm by international standards and, presumably, institutions.

One can raise some other questions about the text, questions which may be as much because a political scientist is reading a law professor's work than because of any intrinsic flaws. The center of the book is made up of previously published essays that have been worked on over some two decades. Because of this, readers will find that the lion's share of citations and references on research coming from the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology are between twenty and thirty years past. Although there is scattered attention to more contemporary works, one may end up wondering if there have not been more findings in the 1980s or 1990s that would reflect on the concerns of the book.

This reader, a political scientist

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absorbed by issues of class and power, cannot help but note the extent to which Reisman's examples are drawn from fairly particular and unique cultural sectors -- I made no systematic count but was struck by how often the models for line-forming behavior were taken from, say, patrons queuing up for opera tickets, law professors lining for the flight home from a convention, or diners hoping for a good table from the maitre de. My own admittedly subjective and ad hoc empirical research suggests that behavior patterns and emergent systems of microlaw may be significantly different in less genteel settings -- where physical size, clothing, or the nature of one's tattoos may have as much to do with social behavior as do principles of etiquette or microlaw.

I can recall two examples from the book in which people broke the microlaw of line formation by "butting in"; in one, the others in a line for movie tickets gave way to an implicit threat of force. In the other, a group of law professors called the police on an indigenous man who cut in to line in a Caribbean airport. In both cases, when the norms of polite society were broken, the whole system of micro-law, to my eye, collapsed as the threat of force prevailed. Reisman reads these settings as affirmations of microlaw because most participants see the violation and reaffirm their long-term commitment to the norm in question. But, if the microlaw is this fragile or, perhaps, this malleable and potentially diverse, do we really speak meaningfully of something called "the law"?

At its heart, though, Reisman's arguments is both important and unassailable: that our social lives are organized by myriad systems of norms, judgments, and sanctions that govern the civil spaces not formally governed by the official law of the modern state. His detailed analysis of the norms and enforcement systems that pervade everyday situations will fascinate readers with eye for these often subtle social patterns. Also, his call for more attention to the interactions between both formal and informal law and the patterns of everyday life and legal consciousness speaks to some of the most interesting contemporary research taking place in the law and society movement.