Bøker i The Cultural Lives of Law-serien

This pioneering collection examines tort law as a cultural phenomenon, drawing on the theories and methods of law, sociology, political science, and anthropology and comparative cases across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

A critical analysis of how reality crime TV shows helped Americans acclimate to a world in which mass incarceration and rising inequality became the "new normal."

Riding the Black Ram demonstrates how, despite the changing nature of the relationship between law and literature, gender stereotypes regarding the figure of the unruly woman persist.

International crime and justice are powerful ideas, associated with a vivid imagery of heinous atrocities, injured humanity, and an international community seized by the need to act. Through an analysis of archival and contemporary data, Imagining the International provides a detailed picture of how ideas of international crime (crimes against all of humanity) and global justice are given content, foregrounding their ethical limits and potentials. Nesam McMillan argues that dominant approaches to these ideas problematically disconnect them from the lived and the specific and foster distance between those who have experienced international crime and those who have not. McMillan draws on interdisciplinary work spanning law, criminology, humanitarianism, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, and human geography to show how understandings of international crime and justice hierarchize, spectacularize, and appropriate the suffering of others and promote an ideal of justice fundamentally disconnected from life as it is lived. McMillan critiques the mode of global interconnection they offer, one which bears resemblance to past colonial global approaches and which seeks to foster community through the image of crime and the practice of punitive justice. This book powerfully underscores the importance of the ideas of international crime and justice and their significant limits, cautioning against their continued valorization.

This book is a deconstruction of the fantasy of colorblindness founding American law.

Taking two narrative genres that are generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife-the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film-this book reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art.

This colorful portrait of law and society during a period of rapid social change reaches a counter-intuitive conclusion about the role of law in injury cases: globalization has led ordinary Thai people to turn away from courts and lawyers and to embrace a form of religious practice that leaves them without any remedy for harms they have suffered.

Through readings of literary works, legal opinions, and treatises, The Affective Life of Law demonstrates that both law and literature are necessary complements in the efforts to take responsibility for the loss and damage inflicted by the first and second World Wars.

We all have opinions on what zoos do, few people consider how they do it. Irus Braverman draws on more than sixty interviews conducted with zoo managers and administrators, as well as animal activists, to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of zooland.

Comparing law to the American practice of common courtesy, this book explains how our courts not only survive under conditions of suspected hypocrisy, but actually depend on these conditions to function.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the "cultural lives"-past and present-of the state's ultimate sanction.

If knowledge is power, then the power of law can be studied through the lens of knowledge. This book opens up a substantive new area of legal research--knowledge production--and presents a series of case studies showing that the hybridity and eclecticism of legal knowledge processes make it unfruitful to ask questions such as, "e;Is law becoming more dominated by science?"e; Mariana Valverde argues that legal decision making cannot be understood if one counterposes science and technology, on the one hand, to common knowledge and common sense on the other. The case studies of law's flexible collage of knowledges range from determinations of drunkenness made by liquor licensing inspectors and by police, through police testimony in "e;indecency"e; cases, to how judges define the "e;truth"e; of sexuality and the harm that obscenity poses to communities. Valverde emphasizes that the types of knowledge that circulate in such legal arenas consist of "e;facts,"e; values, and codes from numerous incompatible sources that combine to produce interesting hybrids with wide-ranging legal and social effects. Drawing on Foucaultian and other analytical tools, she cogently demonstrates that different modes of knowledge, and hence various forms of power, coexist happily. Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge underlines the importance of analyzing dynamically how knowledge formation works. And it helps us to better understand the workings of power and resistance in a variety of contemporary contexts. It will interest scholars and students from disciplines including law, sociology, anthropology, history, and science-and-technology studies as well as those concerned with the particular issues raised by the case studies.

This pioneering collection examines tort law as a cultural phenomenon, drawing on the theories and methods of law, sociology, political science, and anthropology and comparative cases across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Law in Crisis is an unsettling history of natural disaster and political subject formation in the modern world.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the "cultural lives"-past and present-of the state's ultimate sanction.

The Street Politics of Abortion uses three Supreme Court cases to consider the rise and fall of clinic-front anti-abortion protests in the 1980s and 1990s, and illustrates how these conflicts influenced the contemporary form of reproductive politics and the greater New Christian Right.

Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, this work examines the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.

Talks about jurisprudence - or legal philosophy. This book attempts not only a jurisprudential reading of popular culture, but a popular rereading of jurisprudence, removing it from the legal experts in order to restore it to the public at large: a lex populi by and for the people.