Austin Sarat's The Social Organization of Law: Introductory Readings begins with a simple premise--law seeks to work in the world, to order, change, and give meaning to society--and describes legal processes as socially organized. This book connects legal studies to the study of society in two different senses. First, the readings highlight law's responsiveness to various dimensions of social stratification. They also draw attention to the questions of when, why, and how legal decisions and actions respond to the social characteristics (e.g. race, class, and gender) of those making the decisions as well as those who are subject to them. These questions inevitably raise issues of justice and fairness, highlighting the moral dimensions of legal life. Second, Sarat treats law itself as a social organization, emphasizing the complex relations between its various component parts (e.g., judges and jurors, police and prosecutors, appellate courts, and trial courts). The book examines the traditional subject of professional legal study--namely appellate court opinions--and describes some of the most pressing controversies of legal interpretation while questioning how those opinions take on meaning in social life. Sarat also questions whether those at the top of law's bureaucratic structure effectively control the behavior of others in the legal system's chain of command. This anthology provides accessible, up-to-date materials (such as readings on terrorism and the challenges it poses to law, racial profiling, and gay rights) juxtaposed to the classics of the field. Introductions to each reading, along with the notes and questions written by the author, unpack the issues and engage students, enabling them to link the material from one chapter to another. Additional suggested readings provide stimulus for further inquiry. The Social Organization of Law offers students a broad perspective that treats law as a set of institutions and practices combining moral argument, distinctive interpretive traditions, and the social organization of violence.

Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases asks how law helps to constitute the worlds in which we live every day, and how law responds to disruptions and disputes that arise in various realms. Leading scholars explore the dichotomy between everyday practices and trouble cases, and the way various kinds of research have addressed that dichotomy, illuminating the pervasive role of law in social life as well as the capacity of law to respond to social conflict.

A revealing look at the role kin-based societies have played throughout history and around the world. It examines the constitutional principles and cultural institutions from medieval Iceland to modern Pakistan.

This book serves as a compact introduction to the economic analysis of law and organization. At the same time it covers a broad spectrum of issues. It is aimed at undergraduate economics students who are interested in law and organization, law students who want to know the economic basis for the law, and students in business and public policy schools who want to understand the economic approach to law and organization. The book covers such diverse topics as bankruptcy rules, corporate law, sports rules, the organization of Congress, federalism, intellectual property, crime, accident law, and insurance. Unlike other texts on the economic analysis of law, this text is not organized by legal categories but by economic theory. The purpose of the book is to develop economic intuition and theory to a sufficient degree so that one can apply the ideas to a variety of areas in law and organization.

The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice recasts familiar sociological problems of research within a dramatically new and different theoretical and methodological perspective. In seeing law enforcement officers, no less than those accuse of criminal behavior, as locked into the creation of history, or more precisely, a series of retrospective and prospective interpretations of events both within and disengaged from, the social contexts relevant to what purportedly took place, Aaron Cicourel redefined the fault lines of contemporary criminology.The work makes imaginative use of a wide variety of new techniques of analysis from ethnomethodology to community studies—while at no point ignoring basic hard statistical data—in this study of juvenile justice in two California cities. Cicourel states the purpose of his book with clarity: The decision-making activities that produce the social problem called delinquency (and the socially organized procedures that provide for judicial outcomes) are important because they highlight fundamental processes of how social order is possible.This work challenges the conventional view that assumes delinquents are natural social types distributed in some ordered fashion, and produced by a set of abstract internal or external pressures from the social structure. Cicourel views the everyday organizational workings of the police, probation departments, courts, and schools, demonstrating how these agencies contribute to various kinds of transformations of the original events that led to law enforcement contact.This contextual creation of facts in turn leads to improvised, ad hoc interpretations of character structure, family life, and future prospects. In this way, the agencies may generate delinquency by their routine encounters with the young. His new introduction discusses with great detail the methodology behind his research and responses to earlier critiques of his work.