Vol. 15 No.9 (September 2005), pp.811-813

STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Volumes 32-33, by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick (eds).  Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004.  Volume 32: 248pp. Cloth £63.50/€95.00/$95.00.  ISBN: 0-7623-1097-9.  Volume 33: 235pp. Cloth £63.50/€95.00/$95.00, ISBN: 0-7623-1109-6.

STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY: AN AESTHETICS OF LAW AND CULTURE, Volume 34, by Andrew Kenyon and Peter Rush (eds).  Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004.  304pp. Cloth £59.99/€86.95/$94.95.  ISBN: 0-7623-1151-7.

Reviewed by Samuel B. Hoff, Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy, Delaware State University.  Email: shoff [at] desu.edu.

The three books reviewed here are part of the series STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY, which encompasses Volumes 19 through 37 to date.  Previously, the series ran under the titles, RESEARCH IN LAW AND SOCIOLOGY and RESEARCH IN LAW, DEVIANCE, AND SOCIAL CONTROL.  According to the publisher’s web site, the current title denotes the broader focus of recent volumes, which have emphasized legal thought, institutions, and practices together with the intersection between these topics.

Volume 32 contains two parts and a total of six chapters.  Overall, the authors focus on “interdisciplinarity” in legal scholarship and on legal institutions and legal policy. Though most chapters deal with topics associated with American law, Yuksel Sezgin’s chapter assesses legal confrontation between state and society in Israel.   The sole contribution employing social scientific methods appears to be by Jacqueline Goodman, who claims that mothers and children have become trapped “in a war zone between anti-welfare state ideologues, angry fathers fighting the concomitant shift in child support from public assistance to private responsibility, religious zealots intent on crossing the church and state divide by imposing their biblical beliefs on secular society, and a legal paradigm of gender neutrality reflecting these political forces” (p.182), resulting in an increase of single mothers losing custody of children.

Volume 33 includes three parts and a total of six chapters.  The scholars in this book examine creative approaches in legal theory and jurisprudence, the place of identity in diverse times and places, and distinctive interpretations of legal practices and events.   The most interesting section appears to be Part II, featuring chapters by Katherine Franke and Imani Perry.  Franke investigates anti-homosexual policies and laws.  She demonstrates how President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has used homophobic policies to solidify his leadership.  Further, she probes how the Hosni Mubarak government in Egypt is running homosexual show trials as a method for revising the nation’s court system.   Perry contends that Jim Crow laws and segregation were perpetuated as much by property and contract  private law as by the Supreme Court’s decision in PLESSY v. FERGUSON. [*812]

Volume 34 of the series differs in several ways from the two previous ones.  First, the editors of this book are Peter Rush and Andrew Kenyon.  They not only include a Preface, but likewise co-author the initial chapter.  Second, most of the chapters in this text emanate from the 11th International Conference of the Law and Literature Association of Australia, held at the University of Melbourne Law School in 2002.  Third, the book encompasses four parts and a total of fourteen chapters, making its total length about seventy-five pages longer than either of the previous volumes reviewed here.  The overall theme of this volume is practices of representation and their relation to judicial and cultural formations.  Topics covered traverse such disciplines as medicine, cinema studies, literary criticism, philosophy, historiography, visual studies, and art.

The most fascinating and lucid chapter in Volume 34 is “Sovereign Contempt,” authored by Peter Hutchings.    He asserts that certain movies made over that last seven years “form a composite of some key issues: the tendency to expand the reach of states beyond their borders, together with the tendency toward the shrinking of national borders; and the ever more intense internal scrutiny of a state’s own citizenry in response to perceptions of foreign threats” (p.270).   After reviewing two of the movies, The Siege (1998) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Hutchings notes that changes in conceptions of the state and sovereignty—particularly following the terrorist attacks against America on September 11, 2001—have consequences for law.

Over the last decade, several books have been published on the social and political aspects of law—e.g., Abel (1995), Nader (1997), Grana, et al. (2001), Vago (2002), and ISSUES IN LAW AND SOCIETY: SELECTIONS FROM THE CQ RESEARCHER (2001).   While the Abel text is shorter than any of the volumes in the STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY series, the Nader, Vago, and CQ Press books are longer; the length of the Grana, et al. book is approximately the same as Volumes 32 and 33 of the series.   The Nader, Vago, and Grana, et al. studies all cover the subject matter in cross-nationally.  Of those above, the Nader book utilizes the case study method most extensively, though the material is relatively limited to dispute settlement and conflict resolution.

The STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY series books reviewed here have some shortcomings. Neither Volume 32 nor 33 contain a Preface; none of the volumes contains a conclusion which could synthesize the chapters.  The difference in the number of chapters and overall length between Volumes 32 and 33 on the one hand and Volume 34 on the other is stark.  Nonetheless, the series editors and publisher should be commended for promoting nontraditional approaches to examining the law.

REFERENCES:

Abel, Richard L. (ed). 1995. THE LAW AND SOCIETY READER. New York: New York University Press.

Grana, Sheryl J., Jane C. Ollenburger, and Mark Nicholas.  2001. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF LAW.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [*813]

ISSUES IN LAW AND SOCIETY: SELECTIONS FROM THE CQ RESEARCHER.   2001. Washington: CQ Press.

Nader, Laura (ed). 1997.  LAW IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vago, Steven. 2002. LAW AND SOCIETY. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

CASE REFERENCES:

PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 US 537 (1896).

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Samuel B. Hoff.