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This insightful Research Handbook provides a definitive overview of
the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement, reaching beyond historical
and national boundaries to form new conversations. Drawing on deep
roots within the law-and-society tradition, it demonstrates the
powerful virtues of new legal realist research and its attention to
the challenges of translation between social science and law.
Highlighting a contrast with the current Empirical Legal Studies
movement, chapters employ a variety of theoretically grounded
methods to understand law and address legal problems. They explore
an impressive range of contemporary issues including immigration,
policing, globalization, legal education, and access to justice,
concluding with an examination of how different social science
disciplines intersect with NLR. Incorporating global perspectives,
the Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism will be a key
resource for scholars and students of legal theory and sociolegal
studies. Illuminating the best approaches for combining social
science considerations with expert perspectives on legal doctrines,
it will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers
working in fields such as criminal and family law.
There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many
democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are
admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools
are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and
promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those
students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research,
this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse
settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of
power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal
education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that
also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical
messages, showing how presumptions about theory's relation to
practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula.
The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they
affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how
structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions
representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common
dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters
speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of
context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal
education, and the agency of students and faculty.
The legal system relies on social science for answers to many tough
questions. Social scientists study issues relevant to law. But are
law and social science talking past one another? This collection of
important articles and essays explores the difficult process of
translation between these two fields, drawing on three different
scholarly perspectives - the 'insider' approach which views social
science as a tool that lawyers can use for legal ends, the
'outsider' approach of the law and society or sociology of law
movement, and the study of the language of law. Each section of the
volume combines theoretical articles with specific empirical
examples, ranging from the death penalty through
anti-discrimination law to family violence.
There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many
democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are
admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools
are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and
promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those
students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research,
this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse
settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of
power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal
education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that
also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical
messages, showing how presumptions about theory's relation to
practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula.
The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they
affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how
structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions
representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common
dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters
speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of
context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal
education, and the agency of students and faculty.
This volume examines the linguistic problems that arise in efforts
to translate between law and the social sciences. We usually think
of "translation" as pertaining to situations involving distinct
languages such as English and Swahili. But realistically, we also
know that there are many kinds of English or Swahili, so that some
form of translation may still be needed even between two people who
both speak English-including, for example, between English speakers
who are members of different professions. Law and the social
sciences certainly qualify as disciplines with quite distinctive
language patterns and practices, as well as different orientations
and goals. In coordinated papers that are grounded in empirical
research, the volume contributors use careful linguistic analysis
to understand how attempts to translate between different
disciplines can misfire in systematic ways. Some contributors also
point the way toward more fruitful translation practices. The
contributors to this volume are members of an interdisciplinary
working group on Legal Translation that met for a number of years.
The group includes scholars from law, philosophy, anthropology,
linguistics, political science, psychology, and religious studies.
The members of this group approach interdisciplinary communication
as a form of "translation" between distinct disciplinary languages
(or, "registers"). Although it may seem obvious that professionals
in different fields speak and think differently about the world, in
fact experts in law and in social science too often assume that
they can communicate easily when they are speaking what appears to
be the "same" language. While such experts may intellectually
understand that they differ regarding their fundamental assumptions
and uses of language, they may nonetheless consistently
underestimate the degree to which they are actually talking past
one another. This problem takes on real-life significance when one
of the fields is law, where how knowledge is conveyed can affect
how justice is meted out.
This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the
new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal
academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these
volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by
synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory.
Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive
approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical,
pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work
covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis,
intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of
African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law
school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be
essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.
This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the
new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal
academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these
volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by
synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory.
Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive
approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical,
pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work
covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis,
intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of
African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law
school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be
essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.
Anyone who has attended law school knows that it invokes an
important intellectual transformation, frequently referred to as
"learning to think like a lawyer". This process, which forces
students to think and talk in radically new and toward different
ways about conflicts, is directed by professors in the course of
their lectures and examinations, and conducted via spoken and
written language. Beth Mertz's book is the first study to truly
delve into that language to reveal the complexities of how this
process takes place. Mertz bases her linguistic study on tape
recordings from her first year Contracts courses in eight different
law schools. She knows how all these schools employ the Socratic
method between teacher and student, forcing the student to shift
away from moral and emotional terms in thinking about conflict,
toward frameworks of legal authority instead. This move away from
moral frameworks is key, she says, arguing that it represents an
underlying world view at the core not just of law education, but
for better or worse, of the entire US legal system - which, while
providing a useful source of legitimacy and a means to process
conflict, fails to deal systematically with aspects of fairness and
social justice. The latter part of her study shows how differences
in race and gender makeup among law students and professors can
subtly alter this process. Written within the tradition of
anthropological lingustics, Mertz's work - the first to study law
school in this sort of detail - will appeal to a wide spectrum of
readers interested in the intersection of law, language, and
society: sociolinguists; anthropologists; feminist, race, and
social theorists, and law professors.
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