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

Highlighting the competition through his imagery, Judge Richard Posner (1995:271) suggests that "what is striking about American sociology of law is how narrow its primary focus seems to have become and how . . . even within their area of primary interest sociologists of law seem to have difficulty either learning from economic analysis of law or repelling its inroads into their domain." Posner, formerly on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School and now a federal judge, has long been a leading law and economics scholar.

It is important that the "legal field" be defined to include players in the production of law who were not necessarily "lawyers," even though they may be pulled into law schools and legal institutions. Also, when we say that the actors operate in relation to the opportunities and structures in the field, we do not mean to say that they necessarily are rational actors in the sense used by economists. Academics, for example, may orient themselves to the symbolic rewards of academic status, which may not pay off in economic dividends (see Bourdieu 1997:229-40).

Robert Alford of Wisconsin and Sheldon Messinger of Berkeley later surveyed those who expressed an interest at that meeting and elsewhere to see if they would support a membership organization. They sent a questionnaire to 650 persons, asked for other names, and eventually came up with 689 persons interested in joining (Alford & Messinger 1966). Of the group in academic institutions, which represented 85%, onethird were in sociology and one-fifth in law schools. About one-third of the total had law degrees.

The head table at the breakfast consisted of Harry Ball, Leonard Cottrell, Sheldon Messinger, Arnold Rose, Richard Schwartz, Philip Selznick, and Robert Yegge. The original ad hoc committee probably included the following individuals: Robert Alford (Wisconsin, sociology), Harry Ball, Allan Barton (sociology, Columbia),John Coons, Leonard Cottrell (Russell Sage), William Evan (sociology, MIT), Edwin Lemert (sociology, California-Davis), Sheldon Messinger, Thomas Monohan, Arnold Rose (sociology, Minnesota), Richard Schwartz, Philip Selznick, and Robert Yegge (Ball correspondence, 13 Nov. 1964, archived at American Bar Foundation); Minutes of Ad Hoc Committee on Law and Society, 16 Sept. 1964. Those whose affiliations are not identified here are discussed in greater detail in this article. In mid-1965 the committee expanded to include also William J. Curran (Boston University), Gilbert Geis (Los Angeles State), Herbert Jacob, Marie Witkin Kargman (labeled as Section on the Family, ASA), Leon Mayhew (Michigan), Wilbert Moore, Richard Peterson (Vanderbilt), Rita James Simon (Illinois),Jerome Skolnick, and Gresham Sykes (ASA and Denver) (Law and Society Association 1965).

7 Which was created itself around 1950 as a somewhat leftist reaction to "orthodox" social science, which was thought to be too positivistic. Arnold Rose was the representative of the Society to the American Sociological Association at the time.