From legal realism to law and society: Reshaping law for the last stages of the social activist state

Law & Society Review, 1998 by Garth, Bryant, Sterling, Joyce

Academic investment in economics by the mid- to late 1970s tended to pay richer legal career dividends than investment in the disciplines that were built more into LSA. Just as bright and ambitious people were drawn to social science in the 1950s, many were drawn to economics in an era when inflation and the state were considered the great enemies of progress. Economics seemed to define the problems and the solutions for the 1980s just as sociology did for the 1960s.104

We do not have the space or time to continue the story to the present, but we can offer a few brief observations. First, once the LSA was established, many of the leaders of the association tended to define the scholarship around the LSA as a "field" distinct from law and from the social science disciplines. This selfimage came naturally from the fact that many of those who came to LSA were the products of those who already identified with LSA-or people who had no homes elsewhere in part because of the success of LSA. Second, we suggest that the center of gravity of LSA-even as a distinct field-remained closer to law than to social science. And third, the link of the founding of LSA and the progressive politics of the 1960s helped to give the LSA an enduring progressive political imprint.loo

As a final observation, we would like to recall the period of the mid-1960s and suggest some parallels today. It is true that there is no evidence of a revival of the activist state or a renewed War on Poverty, but institutional concerns are again quite important in anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology. In addition, questions of inequality, poverty, and crime may again be moving onto the political agenda. The receptivity of the law schools to a new project of empirical research, or, more generally, to new importation from the social sciences, remains open, but it appears that the time is ripe for a post-"law and economics" initiative. With sufficient energy and new investment in scholarly bridges, the LSA may be able to renew its progressive role at the intersection of law and social science.

Bryant Garth was brought into the LSA through work on a Ford Foundation project on "access to justice" in the late 1970s-after he graduated from law school. Scholars, especially those in the University of Wisconsin group in Madison, such as Lawrence Friedman, Marc Galanter, and David Tnibek drew him to the LSA, and his ties to the LSA no doubt account for his selection to be director of the American Bar Foundation in 1990. Joyce Sterling received an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied criminology with Donald Cressey. She did her Master's in sociology under the supervision of Harry Ball in Hawaii, and her Ph.D. with Wilbert Moore of the University of Denver. Bob Yegge hired her to come to the law school in Denver in 1978. She was the Executive Officer of the LSA from 1984 to 1987.

The campuses involved are the University of California at Berkeley and its Boalt Hall School of Law; the University of Denver (both the College of Law and the Sociology Department), Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.