New Books - Spring 2006, List 1
High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes
Lynn S. Chancer
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005
HV6789.C397 2005 Basement
Shelved in New Books first, then at call number location
From the University of Chicago Press:
O. J. Simpson. The Central Park jogger. Bensonhurst. William Kennedy Smith. Rodney King. These are more than crimes and criminals, more than court cases. They are cultural events that, for better or worse, gave concrete expression to latent social conflicts in American society. In High-Profile Crimes, Lynn Chancer explores how these cases became conflated with larger social causes on a collective level and how this phenomenon has affected the law, the media, and social movements.
An astute and incisive chronicle of some of the most polarizing cases of the 1980s and 1990s, High-Profile Crimes shows that their landmark status results from the overlapping interaction of diverse participants. The merging of legal cases and social causes, Chancer argues, has wrought ambivalent effects on both social movements and the law. On the one hand, high-profile crimes offer important opportunities for emotional expression and raise awareness of social issues. But on the other hand, social problems cannot be resolved through the either/or determinations that are the goals of the legal system, creating frustration for those who look to the outcome of these cases for social progress. Guilt or innocence through the lens of the media leads to either defeat or victory for a social cause-a confounding situation that made the O. J. Simpson case, for example, unable to resolve the issues of domestic violence and police racism that it had come to symbolize.
Based on nearly two hundred interviews, Chancer's discussions of the infamous Central Park jogger and Bensonhurst cases-as well as the rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson, the assault cases of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and, finally, the O. J. Simpson murder trial-provide a convincing, multidimensional and innovative analysis of the most charged public dramas of the last two decades.
Lynn S. Chancer is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University.
The Common Law Tradition: A Collective Portrait of Five Legal Scholars
George W. Liebmann
New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005
KF372.L54 2005 Third Floor
Shelved in New Books first, then at call number location
From Transaction Publishers:
This book commemorates a place and a time in American law teaching, but more importantly, an outlook: the common law tradition. That outlook was empirical and tolerant. These values were carried into expression by a group of people who were not part of a cult or faction nor ruled by the herd instinct. George W. Liebmann has prepared a collective portrait of five scholars who epitomize the tradition.
The focus is Chicago in the 1960s, when the “law and economics” movement occupied a rather minor place. The five figures considered—Edward H. Levi, Harry Kalven, Jr., Karl Llewellyn, Philip Kurland, and Kenneth Culp Davis—did much to broaden the perspectives of the legal academy. Levi made use of sociology, economics, and comparative law. Kalven collaborated with sociologists on the Jury Project and with economists on tax law and auto compensation plans. Llewellyn’s commitment to empirical research underpinned his work on the Uniform Commercial Code. Kurland’s approach to constitutional law was highlighted by his insistence on the relevance of legal history. Davis was an energetic comparativist in his work on administrative law. What distinguished these Chicagoans is that their work was practical and rooted in the law, and hence yielded concrete applications. The group’s diversity, the tolerant atmosphere in which they taught and wrote, and the attachment of its individual members to empirical approaches differentiate them from today’s legal scholars and make their ideas of continuing importance.
The Common Law Tradition examines these figures’ lives and achievements, and assesses the extent to which their immediate agendas were realized. In a year devoted to celebration of the constitutional heroics instigated by Brown v. Board of Education, this book provides a reminder of what has been lost during the last fifty years: a consensual, gradualist, and empirical approach to law reform.
George W. Liebmann is a Baltimore lawyer in private practice with the firm of Liebmann and Shively, P.A. He has been Simon Industrial and Professional Fellow at the University of Manchester and Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
