Many of America's most important social and political movements--abolition, women's suffragette, civil rights, women's liberation, gay and lesbian rights--have organized in the shadow of the law. All are based in their theoretical opposition to the law. Yet at the same time, they are dependent on the laws that prohibit them. Law is thus formed as much through the dynamic tensions that govern how these laws are received as through their official decree.Legal forms such as contracts, ...

Street-Level Sovereignty: The Intersection of Space and Law is a collection of scholarship that considers the experience of law that is subject to social interpretation for its meaning and importance within the constitutive legal framework of race, deviance, property, and the communal investiture in health and happiness. This book examines the intersection of spatiality and law, through the construction of place, and how law is materially framed.

Law is part of the process by which people construct their views of the world. In Material Law, distinguished scholar John Brigham focuses on the places where law and material life intersect, and how law creates and alters our social reality. Brigham looks at an eclectic group of bodies and things—from maps and territories and trends in courthouse architecture to a woman's womb and a judge's body— to make connections between the material and the legal.Theoretically sophist...

In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today's most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society.The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.

Contract and Domination offers a bold challenge to contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, contract theory has once again become central to the Western political tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice almost completely ignored.Carole Pateman and Charles Mills's earlier books, The Sexual Contract (1988) a...

This book offers an advanced introduction to central questions in legal philosophy. What factors determine the content of the law in force? What makes a normative system a legal system? How does law beyond the state differ from domestic law? What kind of moral force does law have? The most important existing views are introduced, but the aim is not to survey the existing literature. Rather, this book introduces the subject by stepping back from the fray to sketch the big picture, to show j...

Federalism is one of the most influential concepts in modern political discourse as well as the focus of immense controversy resulting from the lack of a single coherent definition. Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward Rubin expose the ambiguities of modern federalism, offering a powerful but generous treatise on the modern salience of the term.“Malcolm Feeley and Edward Rubin have published an excellent book.”*—*Sanford Levinson, University of Texas at Austin“At last, an in...

Naomi Zack pioneers a new theory of justice starting from a correction of current injustices. While the present justice paradigm in political philosophy and related fields begins from John Rawls’s 1970 Theory of Justice, Zack insists that what people in reality care about is not justice as an ideal, but injustice as a correctable ill. For a way to describe real injustice and the society in which it occurs, Zack resurrect Arthur Bentley’s key insight that government and law (or political li...

This book is a collection of essays written during the 1980s and 1990s, generated as parts of other, larger activist efforts going on at the time. Read together, the essays trace the progress of the conversations between different activist groups, and between the authors of the pieces, Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, creating a bridge between feminists, gay activists, those in politics, and those in the law.Since the 1995 publication of Sex Wars, the political landscape has al...

Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. Experience, however, has taught us that, in fact, injustice may be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law.Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name ...

"Sarat and Kearns . . . have edited a truly marvelous work on the impact of the law on daily life and vice versa. . . . the essays are all exemplary, thought- provoking works worthy of a long, contemplative read by scholars, lawyers, and judges alike." --Choice"The subject of law in everyday life is timely in theory and in practice. The essays collected here are stimulating for the very different ways in which they reconfigure the meanings of 'the law' as cultural practice...

**The landmark explanation of the competing visions of human nature that lie at the heart of our political conflicts“A classic of a very special kind...Reading it is like looking up at the night sky and discovering a new constellation.” —Christian Science Monitor**Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this patter...