This text is designed for law students and for courses in legal studies programs. The reader deals in depth with the relationship between the legal system and its surrounding society, including such classic issues as the social sources of law and the impact of legal rules and institutions on society. Other chapters examine the role of judges and lawyers in the system and how culture and historical tradition help mold the legal systems of various societies. The book contains six chapters, each containing classic and contemporary readings on these subjects, with extensive notes and questions to guide the student.
'Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise' explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action', the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action', an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be, not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other forms of legal writing, but a multifaceted genre of legal literature in its own right, practical and fanciful, dogmatic and ornamental in turn. This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.
Ethnomethodologists and Conversation Analysts have always been interested in the study of law and legal institutions and there is now a large body of empirical studies, representing a range of analytic traditions in each field. This collection introduces this literature and the research questions pursued by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts, in an accessible form to a general audience in the inter-disciplinary field of law and society studies.
This is a book of papers and interviews about innovative law school courses developed by faculty of the Wisconsin Law School from 1950 to 1970 that forged a path from legal realism to law and social science. These courses took a “law in action” approach to the study of law which became a signature feature of the school’s tradition from that time to the present day. “The Legal Realists of the 1920s and 30s taught that the law that mattered was the law in action, as applied by ordinary officials and experienced by ordinary people. But they mostly failed to get their program adopted as part of professional education alongside the study of appellate cases. Only at Wisconsin—thanks to a cluster of great scholar-teachers in Willard Hurst, Frank Remington, Herman Goldstein, Stewart Macaulay, Bill Whitford, and their collaborators—has the Realist vision been fully and splendidly realized in law teaching. This is the story of that thrilling experiment.” — Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law Emeritus, Stanford University; Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School “This book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the law and society movement and the unique role that the University of Wisconsin Law School has played in that tradition. In a series of essays by and interviews of current and former Wisconsin law teachers, the creativity of Wisconsin’s challenge to the traditional legal academy comes alive.” — Lauren Edelman, Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley "In a time when an increasing number of law schools characterize themselves as bastions of 'law in action,' this volume provides a bracing reminder of a more precise vision. That vision was rooted in the legal realist tradition during an earlier 'golden age' of sociolegal thought at the University of Wisconsin Law School. In this important book, we hear vivid accounts of the innovative law teaching during that time, which took realist discoveries seriously—in Contracts, Legal Process, Legal History, and Criminal Law.” — Elizabeth Mertz, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation; John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerita, UW-Madison Law School
This book assembles the world's most authoritative specialists for a comparative analysis of the enforcement of corporate and securities laws in thirteen national jurisdictions. It examines the enforcement of corporate and securities laws across the globe and across different legal and political systems from an in-depth comparative perspective.
There is a law of healing so plain that even a child can understand it, so fundamental that the ablest mind has never yet thought through all the facts and phenomena of life that rest upon it. It is the purpose of this book to make this law plain. The greatest power in the world is the power of thought, for it is Creative Mind in action. Nothing exists that did not first exist in thought from the first sun that blazed only in the Mind of the Creator, to the last doll-dress fashioned by a childish hand. Science supports the fact that the first movement in nature can have come only from the application of an immaterial force or Will to the primary etheric particles otherwise in a perfect state of equilibrium. It must leave to metaphysics not only an explanation of the Will that moves but also the substance that is moved. This, then, it is the province of this book to show with all that it entails. Since an act of Will is an act of mind, we concern ourselves with the activity of a Creative Mind. Again since Mind acts creatively, there is a way in which it acts. We must also, therefore, teach the way. It is to teach this way that the Bible was written, that Jesus lived and taught. This way has been known for many centuries but has always been taught in terms of the understanding of the day in which the teacher lived. The Great Metaphysician taught largely in parables and oriental figures of speech. But He taught "the Way" and his followers were called the People of the Way.
