This quantitative study uses the history of Stanford University to develop speculations about the ways in which written rules change. It contributes both to a theory of rules and to theories of organizational decision-making, change, and learning.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this widely used text offers a concise introduction to the American legal system for students without a legal background. The book's coverage is cross-disciplinary, informed by the literature of law, business administration and the social sciences, especially public administration and policy. Its goal is to give non-lawyers in all these areas a lucid overview of the workings of the American legal system as it may affect individuals and organizations in their interactions with each other and the environment.Unlike longer, more expensive competing works, "The Dynamics of Law" presents its subject with clarity and precision, and minimal use of legal terms. It offers clear explanations of how to brief a case and how statutes and regulations are codified in the United States. Study problems and review questions in each chapter, drawn from legal literature as well as general interest articles and books, are designed to stimulate classroom discussion.

This book investigates the dynamic intertwinement of law and morality, with a focus on new and developing fields of law. Taking as its starting point the debates and mutual misunderstandings between proponents of different philosophical traditions, it argues that this theoretical pluralism is better explained once law is accepted as an essentially ambiguous concept. Continuing on, the book develops a robust theory of law that increases our grasp on global legal pluralism and the dynamics of law. This theory of legal interactionism, inspired by the work of Lon Fuller and Philip Selznick, also helps us to understand apparent anomalies of modern law, such as international law, the law of the European Convention on Human Rights and horizontal interactive legislation. In an ecumenical approach, legal interactionism does justice to the valuable core of truth in natural law and legal positivism. Shedding new light on familiar debates between authors such as Fuller, Hart and Dworkin, this book is of value to academics and students interested in legal theory, jurisprudence, legal sociology and moral philosophy.

Globalization can be read as consequential reordering, where national rules of law increasingly have to confront the progress of a transnational law of rules. We use conceptual building blocks from political science and sociological institutionalism to approach two sets of issues. First, we explore the nature of this consequential reordering and some of its structuring dynamics. We underscore some of the key features of the emergent transnational law of rules system and contrast it with more traditional, nationally bound, rule of law systems. Second, we consider the potential local, or national, impact of such profound reordering. In the conclusion, we identify key channels and mechanisms of impact as well as potential sources of resistance or of local adaptation. An exploration of those early propositions would be useful to both scholars and practitioners as it would make it possible to read, understand, and even anticipate the variability of cases and situations.

The book presents a comprehensive reconceptualization of Geert Hofstede’s well-known concept of power distance, applying the theory to the specific case of judge–witness courtroom interactions in Polish regional courts. In the light of the detailed critique of Hofstede’s original approach to power distance, the book first carefully develops a three-level concept of power distance, including personal preferences concerning the realization of power relations (subjective level); rules, practices and spatio-architectural arrangements underlying power relations (organizational level); and individual demeanors that can, in practice, increase or decrease the asymmetry between parties to a power relation (interactional level). This reconceptualization provides a universal conceptual apparatus that is applicable to various social settings, but the authors have used it in extensive qualitative and quantitative research focused on courtroom interactions. After laying the theoretical foundations, the book details the elements of judge–witness courtroom interactions (both verbal and non-verbal) that contribute to establishing power distance between judge and witness. These were identified over 6 months of observational research conducted in 2018 in the Kraków regional courts. Lastly, the book addresses the issue of the relationship between the subjective level of power distance and opinions that laypeople can have concerning a judge’s demeanor in the courtroom environment. To do so, it describes specific quantitative research that involved the creation of original film clips depicting witness questioning by the judge in a courtroom in three power distance situations. Offering a coherent framework for examining various interpersonal relations in legal contexts and illustrating how the framework can be applied on the courtroom interactions example, the book will appeal to a wide range of legal practitioners and academics. It also allows scientists outside the legal field to gain a new and broad understanding of power distance that they can easily apply in their respective fields. Furthermore, it provides non-academics with insights into courtroom interactional dynamics, as exemplified by the discussion of Polish judicial practice.