Product Description: Beginning with an overview of the history and philosophy of punishment, these articles explore penal practices in the modern state and the deeper philosophical and social aspects of retributive justice. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Social science has been an important influence on legal thought since the legal realists of the1930s began to argue that laws should be socially workable as well as legally valid. With the expansion of legal rights in the 1960s, the law and social science were bound together by an optimistic belief that legal interventions, if fully informed by social science, could become an effective instrument of social improvement...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Why do some people not hesitate to call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept the pain and losses associated with defective products, unsuccesful surgery, and discrimination? Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey collected accounts of the law from more than four hundred people of diverse backgrounds in order to explore the different ways that people use and experience it...read more