The text makes the case for a revival of general jurisprudence in response to globalisation.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to law and policy responses to contemporary problems in Latin America, such as human rights violations, regulatory dilemmas, economic inequality, and access to knowledge and medicine. It includes 19 chapters written by sociologists, lawyers, and political scientists on the transformations of courts, institutions and rights protection in Latin America, all of which stem from presentations at conferences in Oxford and UCL organised by the editors. The contributors present original analyses based on rigorous research, innovative case-studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives, all written in an accessible style. Topics include the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, institutional design, financial regulation, competition, discrimination, gender quotas, police violence, orphan works, healthcare, and environmental protection, among others. The book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in policymaking, public law, and development.

Private law touches every aspect of people's daily lives—landholding, inheritance, private property, marriage and family relations, contracts, employment, and business dealings—and the court records and legal documents produced under private law are a rich source of information for anyone researching social, political, economic, or environmental history. But to utilize these records fully, researchers need a fundamental understanding of how private law and legal institutions functioned in the place and time period under study. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction in either English or Spanish to private law in Spanish Latin America from the colonial period to the present. M. C. Mirow organizes the book into three substantial sections that describe private law and legal institutions in the colonial period, the independence era and nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. Each section begins with an introduction to the nature and function of private law during the period and discusses such topics as legal education and lawyers, legal sources, courts, land, inheritance, commercial law, family law, and personal status. Each section also presents themes of special interest during its respective time period, including slavery, Indian status, codification, land reform, and development and globalization.

Report on the role of law in economic and social development, with particular reference to legal research - discusses obstacles, institutional frameworks, etc., and recommends a social sciences approach and methodology. References.

"This work will be very valuable for academic and public libraries supporting prelaw, law, social, and cultural studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners; general readers." —CHOICE There are two aspects of scholarship about the legal systems of our day that are especially salient—one being for the first time there is a fair amount of genuine research on legal systems, and two, that this research is increasingly global. As soon as you cross a jurisdictional line, even if it separates countries that are very similar, you enter a different legal system. It cannot be assumed that any particular rule, doctrine, or practice is the same in any two jurisdictions, regardless of how close these jurisdictions are, in terms of history and tradition. The Encyclopedia of Law and Society is the largest comprehensive and international treatment of the law and society field. With an Advisory Board of 62 members from 20 countries and six continents, the three volumes of this state-of-the-art resource represent interdisciplinary perspectives on law from sociology, criminology, cultural anthropology, political science, social psychology, and economics. By globalizing the Encyclopedia′s coverage, American and international law and society will be better understood within its historical and comparative context. Key Features: Includes more than 700 biographical entries that are historical, comparative, topical, thematic, and methodological Presents the rich diversity of European, Latin American, Asian, African, and Australasian developments for the first time in one place to reveal the truly holistic, interdisciplinary virtues of law and society Examines how and why legal systems grow and change, how and why they respond (or fail to respond) to their environment, how and why they impact the life of society, and how and why the life of society impacts in turn these legal systems With borders more porous than ever before, this Encyclopedia reflects the paradoxical reality of modern life, including legal life. This valuable resource aims to present research, along with the theories on which it is grounded, fairly and comprehensively and is a must-have for all academic libraries.

Ever since H.L.A. Hart's self-description of The Concept of Law as an 'exercise in descriptive sociology', contemporary legal theorists have been debating the relationship between legal theory and sociology, and between legal theory and social science more generally. There have been some who have insisted on a clear divide between legal theory and the social sciences, citing fundamental methodological differences. Others have attempted to bridge gaps, revealing common challenges and similar objects of inquiry. Collecting the work of authors such as Martin Krygier, David Nelken, Brian Tamanaha, Lewis Kornhauser, Gunther Teubner and Nicola Lacey, this volume - the second in a three volume series - provides an overview of the major developments in the last thirty years. The volume is divided into three sections, each discussing an aspect of the relationship of legal theory and the social sciences: 1) methodological disputes and collaboration; 2) common problems, especially as they concern different modes of explanation of social behaviour; and 3) common objects, including, most prominently, the study of language in its social context and normative pluralism.

This book represents a unique resource about Stewart Macaulay one of the common law world’s leading scholars of the law of contract and of the law in action approach to the study of law. Since 1959, he has published over 50 articles in leading journals, a number of working papers, (with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Law School) a pathbreaking casebook for the teaching of the law of contract, and (with other colleagues) equally pathbreaking collections of materials for the teaching of the law in action or law in context approach to the study of law. In this work Macaulay has established himself as one of the postwar world’s leading scholars of the law of contract and of the sociology of law. His work is an absolute reference point in both disciplines, and it has attracted great attention elsewhere, most notably in economic sociology, where his concept of non-contractual economic relationships is regarded as an important theoretical innovation. Macaulay’s work has become an object of commentary in its own right, and the proposed book is intended to assist further such commentary by making hitherto difficult to obtain works readily accessible. Most of Macaulay’s work is now, when the leading journals are generally available in electronic form, readily accessible to students and researchers in universities. There are, however, a number of interesting and in most cases important works published in less accessible journals or works which were not published in an electronic form, which are difficult to obtain. This book will make them readily available, and in so doing will make it possible in future for scholars to have Macaulay’s complete oeuvre readily to hand. Although Macaulay’s work has provoked very considerable discussion, there previously have been no overall accounts of that work as opposed to critical engagements with aspects of it. In this book, two additional essays by leading commentators give accounts of Macaulay’s work and provide an introduction to, exegesis of and general evaluation of Macaulay’s work as a whole which is not to be found in the existing literature.

This book assembles essays on legal sociology and legal history by an international group of distinguished scholars. All of them have been influenced by the eminent and prolific legal historian, legal sociologist and scholar of comparative law, Lawrence M. Friedman. Not just a Festschrift of essays by colleagues and disciples, this volume presents a sustained examination and application of Friedman's ideas and methods. Together, the essays in this volume show the powerful ripple effects of Friedman's work on American and comparative legal sociology, American and comparative legal history and the general sociology of law and legal change.

Contains comparative and theoretical essays on the legal profession around the world.