Lecture 1: Flashcards
Power
Ability to impose your will over others, even over the course of their resistance
Setting the agenda: gambling, Brown v board
Ideology/ hegemony: ideas as forms of power and domination
Examples of ideology/ hegemony
- violence/spanking (Rodney king)
- Barrington Moore jr
- sexual ideologies in the courtroom
- precedent
- mass media (elections)
Morality/interpretation
- social construction of legal realities
- discourse/language
Examples of morality/ interpretation
- culture of subjective experience (Becker)
- partying
- you’re walking with this man
- you’re talking about the statement of reality
Malinowski
- law is all sorts of social control
- studied islanders in South Pacific
- neon of reciprocity etc even without modern courts, penal system
- still people organized their lives around identifiable rules (god father, Jeremiah Johnson)
- i obey the law because i want to. Any governmental control involved in that?
Hoebel
Law is authorized physical force or violence sanctioned by the group
-if a comcanche brave steals a horse from another member of the group, tribe punishes offender
Weber
Law is coercion brining about conformity by a specialized staff.
-key phrase: “specialized staff” such as police, judges, attorneys etc.
Berkeley school of law and society
None of the definitions talk about justice or the rightness of judgments
What about morality of law???
Ex: Adolfo eichmann (eichmann interrogated)
What can we conclude? What about law?
- ambiguity if legal rules. Rules not precise but fuzzy and negotiable. How extreme must hairstyle be to justify firing?
- what kinds of behavior constitute race or gender discrimination? How does the behavior fit under auspices of rule?
- k-s and Williams rule (another example)
Legal discretion
If legal rules are ambiguous then legal decision makes from police to judge etc have considerable discretion (or decision making latitude) about how they interpret and apply rules. What factors affect discretion.
“Bows my turn to get back at those SOB’s”
Race/gender bias laws
Renee’s case would have been simple if AA based decision on simple racism or sexism. But no evidence of that (according to judge). Whatever bias operates is much more subtle, taken-for- granted. The standard for appearance was never taken as problematic.
Law culture and identity
Law is a symbolic human construction not a natural in the nature of things. Renee shows how law function as part of the definitional process
-k-s expert; Rodney king, what’s partying meant
Law and economic power
Major corporations like AA are repeat players in the legal game. They have money, power and know the rules of the game
Social dimension
We will miss if we understand law on its own terms. Law and society studies how law is lodged in social experience
Law and legal philosophy are…
Prescriptive. View law as a logical system (felon in possession). Highly intellectualized system of thought.
