Download or read book The Common Place of Law written by Patricia Ewick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-07-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some people call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept devastating loss or actions without complaint? Sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey examine more than 400 case studies to explore the various ways the law is perceived and utilized, or not, by a broad spectrum of citizens.
Download or read book Law as Culture written by Lawrence Rosen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture, Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the facts that are adduced in a legal forum connect to the ways in which facts are constructed in other areas of everyday life, how the processes of legal decision-making partake of the logic by which the culture as a whole is put together, and how courts, mediators, or social pressures fashion a sense of the world as consistent with common sense and social identity. While the book explores issues comparatively, in each instance it relates them to contemporary Western experience. The development of the jury and Continental legal proceedings thus becomes a story of the development of Western ideas of the person and time; African mediation techniques become tests for the style and success of similar efforts in America and Europe; the assertion that one's culture should be considered as an excuse for a crime becomes a challenge to the relation of cultural norms and cultural diversity. Throughout the book, the reader is invited to approach law afresh, as a realm that is integral to every culture and as a window into the nature of culture itself.
Download or read book Using Legal Culture written by David Nelken and published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In comparative legal studies, the concept of legal culture has come to play an increasingly significant role in contemporary theorising, empirical analysis and methodological innovation. Using Legal Culture explores a number of the key issues regarding the use of this concept. The essays contained in this book were originally presented in the Journal of Comparative Law Workshop held in Venice University (Ca' Foscari) May 20-21, 2010. The papers show that legal culture is a very productive concept, and also one which carries different meanings and resonances in different places and different languages and which sometimes means different things to different scholars. This collection therefore offers an especially helpful set of reflections on the nature and analytical value of this concept. The studies published here broadly speaking fall into three categories: general reflections on the concept of legal culture, the use of the concept in the micro-dimensions of the engagement of law with everyday life, and legal culture as a more holistic idea employed to characterise aspects of professionally administered schemes of law and practice. The chapters are written by prominent international scholars, and given a general introduction by one the foremost researchers in the study of legal culture: Professor David Nelken. The book provides an important resource for all students and scholars with an interest in comparative legal studies, as well as for anyone interested in the relationship between law and culture.
Download or read book Everyday Law on the Street written by Mariana Valverde and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-22 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toronto prides itself on being “the world’s most diverse city,” and its officials seek to support this diversity through programs and policies designed to promote social inclusion. Yet this progressive vision of law often falls short in practice, limited by problems inherent in the political culture itself. In Everyday Law on the Street, Mariana Valverde brings to light the often unexpected ways that the development and implementation of policies shape everyday urban life. Drawing on four years spent participating in council hearings and civic association meetings and shadowing housing inspectors and law enforcement officials as they went about their day-to-day work, Valverde reveals a telling transformation between law on the books and law on the streets. She finds, for example, that some of the democratic governing mechanisms generally applauded—public meetings, for instance—actually create disadvantages for marginalized groups, whose members are less likely to attend or articulate their concerns. As a result, both officials and citizens fail to see problems outside the point of view of their own needs and neighborhood. Taking issue with Jane Jacobs and many others, Valverde ultimately argues that Toronto and other diverse cities must reevaluate their allegiance to strictly local solutions. If urban diversity is to be truly inclusive—of tenants as well as homeowners, and recent immigrants as well as longtime residents—cities must move beyond micro-local planning and embrace a more expansive, citywide approach to planning and regulation.
Download or read book Invitation to Law Society written by Kitty Calavita and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research and real-life examples that “lucidly connect some of the divisive social issues confronting us today to that thing we call ‘the law’” (Law and Politics Book Review). Law and society is a rapidly growing field that turns the conventional view of law as mythical abstraction on its head. Kitty Calavita brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law is found not only in statutes and courtrooms but in our institutions and interactions, while inviting readers into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to both law as it is written and actual legal practices, as well as the law’s potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. With this second edition of Invitation to Law and Society, Calavita brings up to date what is arguably the leading introduction to this exciting, evolving field of inquiry and adds a new chapter on the growing law and cultural studies movement. “Entertaining and conversational.” —Law and Social Inquiry
Download or read book Owning Culture written by Kembrew McLeod and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Owning Culture demonstrates how intellectual property law has expanded to allow for private ownership of a remarkable array of things, from the patenting of human genes linked to breast cancer to the trademarking of the phrases «home style» and «freedom of ownership.» This book examines diverse areas of contemporary life affected by intellectual property law, including sampling practices in hip-hop music, the appropriation of Third World indigenous knowledge about the medical uses of plants, the effects of seed patenting on farming, and the impact of copyright law on folk music-making. By placing under scrutiny the individualistic, Western conception of the «author» that grounds intellectual property law, Kembrew McLeod shows how borrowing practices have been - and continue to be - central to cultural production. Additionally, this book highlights how intellectual property law facilitates the privatization of culture and the transfer of power into the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations. Clearly written, thoughtful, and thought provoking, Owning Culture provides an innovative approach to the study of culture and law.
Download or read book Nobody s Law written by Marc Hertogh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobody’s Law shows how people – who are disappointed, disenchanted, and outraged about the justice system – gradually move away from law. Using detailed case studies and combining different theoretical perspectives, this book explores the legal consciousness of ordinary people, businessmen, and street-level bureaucrats in the Netherlands. The empirical research in this study tells an original and alternative narrative about the role of law in everyday life. While previous studies emphasize the law’s hegemony and argue that it’s ‘all over’, Hertogh shows that legal proliferation makes it harder for people to know, and subsequently identify with, the law. As a result, official law has become increasingly remote and irrelevant to many people. The central finding presented in this highly topical text is that these developments signal a process of ‘legal alienation’— a gradual and mundane process with potentially serious consequences for the legitimacy of law. A timely and original study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of law and society, socio-legal studies and legal theory.
Download or read book Law and Popular Culture written by Michael Asimow and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.
Download or read book Law and the Modern Mind written by Susanna L. Blumenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence. Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons. In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.
Download or read book Law Culture and Visual Studies written by Anne Wagner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 1051 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a ‘must read’ that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture & Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law’s representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities & the Arts, Australian National University, Australia
Download or read book The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties written by Rosemary J. Coombe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-13 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn ethnography of inellectual property, discussing the uses made of items of inellectual property by various cultural groups -- for purposes of identity, solidaritiy, resistance and so forth. /div
Download or read book A People s Constitution written by Rohit De and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.
Download or read book When Law Goes Pop written by Richard K. Sherwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-06-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Law Goes Pop" is an examination of legal practice in today's world, one that should be needed by everyone concerned with the future of our legal system and the meaning we invest in it.
Download or read book Comparing Legal Cultures written by David Nelken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume cross-examines mainstream approaches to studying legal culture (e.g. those of Friedman and Blankenburg). It includes debates over the concept of legal culture and a variety of case studies of different legal cultures.
Download or read book The Life of the Law written by Laura Nader and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Evolving an Ethnography of Law: A Personal Document 2 Lawyers and Anthropologists 3 Hegemonic Processes in Law: Colonial to Contemporary 4 The Plaintiff: A User Theory Epilogue Bibliography Index.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Justice written by Lawrence Rosen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-06-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluation of issues and the shapes of a judge's decision. The Anthropology of Justice is not only the first full-scale study of the actual operations of the actual operations of a modern Islamic law court anywhere in the Arab world but a demonstration of the theoretical basis on which a cultural analysis of the law may be founded.
Download or read book The Nature of Legal Interpretation written by Brian G. Slocum and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language shapes and reflects how we think about the world. It engages and intrigues us. Our everyday use of language is quite effortless—we are all experts on our native tongues. Despite this, issues of language and meaning have long flummoxed the judges on whom we depend for the interpretation of our most fundamental legal texts. Should a judge feel confident in defining common words in the texts without the aid of a linguist? How is the meaning communicated by the text determined? Should the communicative meaning of texts be decisive, or at least influential? To fully engage and probe these questions of interpretation, this volume draws upon a variety of experts from several fields, who collectively examine the interpretation of legal texts. In The Nature of Legal Interpretation, the contributors argue that the meaning of language is crucial to the interpretation of legal texts, such as statutes, constitutions, and contracts. Accordingly, expert analysis of language from linguists, philosophers, and legal scholars should influence how courts interpret legal texts. Offering insightful new interdisciplinary perspectives on originalism and legal interpretation, these essays put forth a significant and provocative discussion of how best to characterize the nature of language in legal texts.
