Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-wxhwt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T23:23:38.066Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Law's Strange Allure: The Power of Legal Lore beyond the Law‐Politics Divide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Naomi Murakawa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

American political culture is both seduced and repulsed by legal power, and this essay reviews Gordon Silverstein's contribution to understanding the causes and consequences of “law's allure.” Using interbranch analysis, Silverstein argues that law is dangerously alluring as a political shortcut, but ultimately he concludes that law offers no exit from “normal politics” and the hard work of “changing minds.” This essay suggests that Silverstein's framework—his dyadic focus on courts and Congress, constructive and deconstructive patterns, legal formality and normal politics—strips law from its animating context of interests, inequality, and ideology. Without consideration of these larger forces of power, Silverstein's framework misplaces law's ability to “change minds” in perverse and unexpected ways.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 2010 , pp. 1065 - 1076
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Carol. 2003. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, Jeb. 2010. Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics. Symposium: Law & Social Inquiry 35 (4): 1029–40.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine. 1997. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bonilla‐Silva, Eduardo. 2001. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
Bonilla‐Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism without Racists: Color‐Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Equality in the United States, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Burke, Thomas F. 2002. Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights: The Battle over Litigation in American Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Dudziak, Mary L. 1988. Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative. Stanford Law Review 41:61–120.Google Scholar
Duhigg, Charles. 2009. E.P.A. Vows Better Effort on Water. New York Times, October 15.Google Scholar
Epp, Charles R. 2010. Law's Allure and the Power of Path‐Dependent Legal Ideas. Symposium: Law & Social Inquiry 35 (4): 1041–51.Google Scholar
Farber, Danial A. 1999. Taking Slippage Seriously: Noncompliance and Creative Compliance in Environmental Law. Harvard Environmental Law Review 23:297–325.Google Scholar
Feagin, Joe R. 2006. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Frankenberg, Erica, Lee, Chungmei, and Orfield, Gary. 2003. A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? Cambridge, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc. 1983. The Radiating Effects of Courts. In Empirical Theories of Courts, ed. Boyum, Keith and Mather, Lynn, 117–42. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc. 1998. The Faces of Mistrust: The Image of Lawyers in Public Opinion, Jokes, and Political Discourse. University of Cincinnati Law Review 66:805–45.Google Scholar
Gershkoff, Amy, and Kushner, Shana. 2005. Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11‐Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration's Rhetoric. Perspectives on Politics 3 (3): 525–37.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. 2007a. The Battle over Brown: How Conservatives Appropriated Brown v. Board of Education . Slate, July 2. http://www.slate.com/id/2169616/pagenum/all/#p2 (accessed January 17, 2010).Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. 2007b. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. Law as Medium and Law as Institution. In The Dilemmas of Law in the Welfare State, ed. Teubner, Gunther, 203–20. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Haltom, William, and McCann, Michael. 2004. Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kagan, Robert A. 2001. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kozol, Jonathan. 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown.Google Scholar
Lovell, George I. 2003. Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael. 1992. Reform Litigation on Trial. Law & Social Inquiry 17 (4): 715–43.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael. 1994. Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael. 1996. Causal versus Constitutive Explanations (or, On the Difficulty of Being So Positive …). Law & Social Inquiry 21 (2): 457–82.Google Scholar
Melnick, R. Shep. 2010. Silverstein's Allure . Symposium: Law & Social Inquiry 35 (4): 1053–63.Google Scholar
Orfield, Gary, and Lee, Chungmei. 2004. Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare? Cambridge, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Peller, Gary. 1993. Criminal Law, Race, and the Ideology of Bias: Transcending the Critical Tools of the Sixties. Tulane Law Review 67:2231–51.Google Scholar
Provine, Doris Marie. 2007. Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2008 1991. The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Scheingold, Stuart A. 1974. The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Gordon. 2009. Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Strolovitch, Dara Z. 2007. Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).Google Scholar
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al., 551 U.S. 701 (2007).Google Scholar
Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962).Google Scholar