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The Limits of Law: On Chambliss & Seidman's Law, Order and Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
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- Review Essay
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1983
References
1 See, e.g., Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); James M. Inverarity, Pat Lauderdale & Barry C. Feld, Law and Society: Sociological Perspectives on Criminal Law ch. 7 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983).Google Scholar
2 William Chambliss & Robert Seidman, Law, Order and Power (rev. ed. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1982).Google Scholar
3 The distinction, therefore, is similar to that between substance and procedure, both components of the legal system. While the distinction is useful for analysis, in the interest of simplicity I use “law” generally to refer to the legal system (unless otherwise indicated).Google Scholar
4 If nothing else, this result argues for the importance of law and society studies to the body of critical analyses aimed at understanding the evolving role of the state in maintaining and changing class relationships and vice versa. See, e.g., James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973); Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis, and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).Google Scholar
5 In later analysis, these population “parts” or “segments” are generally discussed as social class groupings.Google Scholar
6 Isaac D. Balbus, Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the “Relative Autonomy” of the Law, 11 Law & Soc'y Rev. 571, 577 (1977). Note that this process has been identified as being true for individuals in the adversary system of Anglo-American law, both historically (see William J. Chambliss, The State, the Law, and the Definition of Behavior as Criminal or Delinquent, in Daniel Glaser, ed., Handbook of Criminology (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Co., 1974) and at present, as indicated in Abraham S. Blum berg's classic study of the public defender system (The Practice of Law as a Confidence Game: Organizational Cooptation of a Profession, 1 Law & Soc'y Rev., June 1967, at 15).Google Scholar
7 . See, e.g., William Lilley, III & James, C. Miller III, The New Social Regulation, Pub. Interest, Spring 1977, at 49, 51; Harold, C. Barnett, Corporate Capitalism, Corporate Crime, 27 Crime & Delinquency 14 (1981).Google Scholar
8 Peter C. Yeager, The Politics of Corporate Social Control: The Federal Response to Industrial Water Pollution ch. 7 (Ph.D. dis., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981).Google Scholar
9 Claus Offe, Class Rule and the Political System: On the Selectiveness of Political Institutions II, unpublished translation of Strukturprobleme des Kapitalistischen Staates ch. 3 (Frankfort: Sukrkamp, 1973), as quoted in D. A. Gold, C. Y. H. Lo & E. O. Wright, Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State, 27 Monthly Rev., Nov. 1975, at 38. See also Elmer E. Schattschneider, The Semi-sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America 71 New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960).Google Scholar
10 In this connection, an Office of Management and Budget examiner indicated that one reason the Justice Department's Antitrust Division does not seek greater increases in its relatively small budget is because it perceives that the political climate—including business interests—“would be hostile to large increases in division activity.” See Suzanne Weaver, Decision to Prosecute: Organization and Public Policy in the Antitrust Division 141 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). For a discussion of some limits on antitrust enforcement in the United States, see Marshall B. Clinard & Peter C. Yeager, Corporate Crime ch. 6 (New York: Free Press, 1980).Google Scholar
11 Clinard & Yeager, supra note 10, at 96, 97.Google Scholar
12 E.g., pollution control legislation redistributes wealth to the extent that it forces polluters to absorb costs formerly imposed on society in the form of waste. Other forms of business regulation, such as occupational safety and consumer product safety laws, also may impose substantial new costs on producers.Google Scholar
13 . Yeager, , supra note 8, at 202. A recent study of the enforcement activities of the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement found that larger firms, because of their greater resources and technical expertise, were able to more successfully negotiate the nature of violations with federal inspectors, and were seen by the inspectors as more likely than smaller companies to challenge stringent enforcement through legal appeals. One result was that smaller companies tended to be assessed higher fines than the larger corporate violators. See John, Lynxwiler, , Shover, Neal & Donald, A. Clelland, The Organization and Impact of Inspector Discretion in a Regulatory Bureaucracy, 30 Soc. Probs. 425 (1983).Google Scholar
14 . 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
15 . 382 U.S. 436 (1965).Google Scholar
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18 E.g., during the 1890s Congress passed a series of laws culminating in the River and Harbors Act of 1899, a criminal statute outlawing discharges that impeded or obstructed navigation. Some businesses had been treating rivers and harbors as waste dumps, thereby threatening transportation networks vital to commerce. The state was thus called on to remedy a structural conflict between capitalists to protect industrial growth itself (on which the state, too, depended). See Yeager, supra note 8, at 118; Earl Finbar Murphy, Man and His Environment: Law 22 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). A similar argument is made for the development of environmental controls in Great Britain in the nineteenth century in James Ridgeway, The Politics of Ecology 15 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).Google Scholar
19 Yeager, supra note 8, at 147.Google Scholar
20 See, e.g., Myrick A. Freeman III & Robert H. Haveman, Clean Rhetoric and Dirty Water, in Walt Anderson, ed., Politics and Environment: A Reader in Ecological Crisis (rev. ed. Pacific Palisades, Cal.: Goodyear, 1975); Barnett, supra note 7.Google Scholar
21 See, e.g., Neil Gunningham, Pollution, Social Interest and the Law 40 (London: Martin Robertson, 1974).Google Scholar
22 See also Clinard & Yeager, supra note 10.Google Scholar
23 Note that the United States is a rare exception among Western democracies in not having any state ownership of at least a segment of its oil industry.Google Scholar