Law & Society in Transition: Toward Responsive Law
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Year by year, law seems to penetrate ever larger realms of social, political, and economic life, generating both praise and blame. Nonet and Selznick's Law and Society in Transition explains in accessible language the primary forms of law as a social, political, and normative phenomenon. They illustrate with great clarity the fundamental difference between repressive law, riddled with raw conflict and the accommodation of special interests, and responsive law, the reasoned effort to realize an ideal of polity.
To make jurisprudence relevant, legal, political, and social theory must be reintegrated. As a step in this direction, Nonet and Selznick attempt to recast jurisprudential issues in a social science perspective. They construct a valuable framework for analyzing and assessing the worth of alternative modes of legal ordering. The volume's most enduring contribution is the authors' typology-repressive, autonomous, and responsive law. This typology of law is original and especially useful because it incorporates both political and jurisprudential aspects of law and speaks directly to contemporary struggles over the proper place of law in democratic governance. In his new introduction, Robert A. Kagan recasts this classic text for the contemporary world. He sees a world of responsive law in which legal institutions-courts, regulatory agencies, alternative dispute resolution bodies, police departments-are periodically studied and redesigned to improve their ability to fulfill public expectations. Schools, business corporations, and governmental bureaucracies are more fully pervaded by legal values. Law and Society in Transition describes ways in which law changes and develops. It is an inspiring vision of a politically responsive form of governance, of special interest to those in sociology, law, philosophy, and politics.
About the Author
Philippe Nonet is professor of law at University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of many books including Administrative Justice. Philip Selznick is professor emeritus of law and sociology, School of Law, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (with Philippe Nonet and Howard M. Vollmer), and The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Robert A. Kagan is professor of political science and law at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society. His publications include Regulatory Justice, Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness (with Eugene Bardach), and Regulatory Encounters.
Law and Society in Transition : Toward Responsive Law,Philippe Nonet,Philip Selznick,Robert A. Kagan,Transaction Publishers,0765806428,General,Legal Reference / Law Profession,Philosophy Of Law,Political Freedom & Security - Law Enforcement,Political Science,Politics/International Relations,Sociological jurisprudence,Foundations of law,Jurisprudence & philosophy of law,Law / General,Sociology,Law,Politics
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