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Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

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Type
Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1992 

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References

1 17 Law & Soc. Inquiry (1992).Google Scholar

2 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978).Google Scholar

3 I should state explicitly that Hunt makes no claim to have sufficiently delineated either these concepts or the processes they are meant to name. Thus, he provides a discussion of the notion of structural coupling (at 34–36) to illustrate the ways in which the concept of hegemony needs to be better specified and the constitutive processes delineated. Also, Hunt refers (at 31) to Woodiwiss's notion of transposition as a conceptual advance that helps to describe one of the ways in which law helps to constitute social relations by changing the social positions of objects and thus also channeling or denying access to other social positions and resources.Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., works from the “Birmingham School” of cultural studies: Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979) (“Hebdige, Subculture”); Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Stuart Hall & T. Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain 40 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976) (“Hall & Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals”).Google Scholar

5 E.g., Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey, “Conformity, Contestation, and Resistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness,”New Eng. L. Rev. (forthcoming 1992); Kristin Burniller, The Civil Rights Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); George Lipsitz, Time Passages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Barbara Yngvesson, “Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town,” 22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 409 (1988). See also Thomas Cushman, “Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Management of Oppositional Popular Culture in the Contemporary Soviet Union,”Current Perspectives in Social Theory (forthcoming 1992), and id, “Rich Rastas and Communist Rockers: A Comparative Study of the Origin, Diffusion and Defusion of Revolutionary Musical Codes,” 25 J. Popular Culture 17 (1991).Google Scholar

6 This discussion of theoretically informed field studies and cultural analysis borrows from ongoing work in collaboration with Patricia Ewick, “Varieties of Legal Consciousness: The Place of Law in the Lives of Ordinary Americans” (research proposal, September 1991).Google Scholar

7 See, e.g., Engel, David, “Law, Time and Community,” 21 Law & Soc'y Rev. 605 (1987); Carol Greenhouse, Praying for Justice: Faith, Order and Community in an American Town (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Thomas Kearns & Austin Sarat, Law in Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

8 Stuart Henry, Private Justice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) (“Henry, Private Justice”).Google Scholar

9 Stuart Henry, “The Construction and Deconstruction of Social Control: Thoughts on the Discursive Production of State Law and Private Justice,” in John Lowman, Robert Menzias, & T. S. Palys, eds., Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control 100 (Aldershot, Hants, England: Gower, 1987) (“Henry, ‘Construction and Deconstruction’”).Google Scholar

10 Id at 103.Google Scholar

11 Henry, Private Justice 220.Google Scholar

12 Connell, R. W., Gender and Power 93, 95 (Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1987), citing M. Young & P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962).Google Scholar

13 For an extended discussion see Comaroff, Jean, Body of Power: Spirit of Resistance pt. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); also Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” 19 Theory & Soc'y 545 (1985); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); id, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

14 Neurath, O., “Practical Sentences,”in Ayer, A. J., ed., Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959).Google Scholar

15 Henry, “Construction and Deconstruction” at 98. Henry is paraphrasing and quoting from David Attenborough, “Animal Language” (BBC, 1982).Google Scholar

16 See, e.g., Richard L. Abel, “Torts,” in David Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law (New York: Basic Books, 1982; 2d ed. 1990) (“Kairys, Politics of Law”); Gerald Frug, “The Ideology of Bureaucracy in American Law,” 94 Harv. L. Rev. 1277 (1984); Mary Joe Frug, “Rereading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook,” 34 Am U. L. Rev. 1065 (1985); Kairys, Politics of Law, Duncan Kennedy, “Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication,” 89 Harv. L Rev. 1685 (1976); L. LaRue, “A Jury of One's Peers,” 33 Wash & Lee. L. Rev. 841 (1976); Martha Minow, Making All the Difference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Fran Olsen, “Statutory Rape: A Feminist Critique of Rights Analysis,” 65 Tex. L Rev. 387 (1984); J. Singer, “The Legal Rights Debate in Analytical Jurisprudence,” 1982 Wis. L. Rev. 975; Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Rights and Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

17 Hebdige, Subculture 16 (cited in note 4).Google Scholar

18 Hall &a Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals 40 (cited in note 4).Google Scholar

19 Gordon Marshall, “Some Remarks on the Study of Working Class Consciousness,” 12 Politics & Soc'y 263 (1983).Google Scholar

20 Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity 14 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); cf. Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” 51 Am Soc. Rev. 273 (1986); Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Jerome Karabel & L A. H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology in Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

21 Susan S. Silbey & Austin Sarat, “Dispute Processing in Law and Legal Scholarship: From Institutional Critique to a Reconstitution of the Juridical Subject,” 66 Denver L. Rev. 437 (1988).Google Scholar

22 In an important early work, Isaac Balbus, “Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the Relative Autonomy of Law,” 12 Law & Soc'y Rev. 571 (1977), offers a related analysis in which he contends that the generalized categories of liberal law constitute one of its primary mechanisms of domination. He suggests that the specific form of liberal law reproduces the essential characteristics of capitalism in what he calls the commodity form of law. He suggests that, in both capitalism and liberal law, generalized mediums of signification and exchange (e.g., money, individuals, rights) are used to obscure and distort the variation within those categories. One might consider, generally, the similarity between linguistic coda and legal concepts for obscuring the particularities of their use, as well as mobilizing investment in the categories.Google Scholar

23 Mitchell, 19 Theory & Soc'y (cited in note 13).Google Scholar

24 See Susan S. Silbey, “A Sociological Interpretation of the Relationship between Law and Society,” in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., Law and the ordering of Our Life Together (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishers, 1989), and Susan S. Silbey & Austin Sarat, “Critical Traditions in Law and Society Research,” 21 Law & Soc'y Rev. 165 (1987).Google Scholar