This major new textbook provides a clear and comprehensive guide to the sociology of law, surveying current theoretical debates and examining socio-legal research. Exploring the relationship between the law and other aspects of social life, it goes beyond a discussion of contemporary institutions, focusing on broad and general patterns grounded in specific examples from a wide range of contexts. The book addresses: the social conditions under which laws emerge and are changed; the extent to which law can be a resource to implement social change; the kinds of values or world views that laws incorporate; and the ways in which laws shape social institutions and practices and vice versa. Accessible and wide-ranging, Law and S

Product Description: Litigation Past and Present takes a cross-disciplinary and comparative perspective on its subject. It examines actual patterns of litigation, both historical and contemporary, and looks at the many ways in which courts provide strategies for social change and social justice...read more