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Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Stewart Macaulay
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Extract

Some of us see law as largely marginal to American life (see, e.g., Macaulay, 1984), but other colleagues assert that law constitutes society. One position does not contradict the other because we are talking about different things. Cases, statutes, and enforcement agencies very seldom directly influence everyday life. At the same time, law is an important part of culture. Despite many debates (see, e.g., Hall, 1977; Harris, 1980; Ortner, 1984), legal culture affects everyday life in important ways. At the very least, it provides a vocabulary with which we rationalize our actions to others and ourselves. As Geertz (1983: 173, 232) insists, “law is not a bounded set of norms …, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Law is “meaning … not machinery.” It is “a species of social imagination.” It “is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them.”

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , 1987 , pp. 185 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This is a revised version of the presidential address given at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago on May 31, 1986. I want to thank Dr. Jacqueline R. Macaulay, whose critical editing improved the manuscript greatly. I gave talks based on the paper at the University of Western Australia, Faculty of Law, Perth, and at the University of Toronto Law School. I benefited a great deal from the discussions after these presentations. As always, all mistakes are mine, because I didn't take all the excellent advice offered.

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