SOC 3730 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Lady Justice
17 Jan 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Chapter 1: courts, law and society page #1-12: Courts, law and society: the social science study of law differs from writing by practitioners and most academic lawyers in refusing to take for granted law"s own account of its significance . I want to help others recognize that any institution, any formal process, has many faces and belongs in different senses and to different degrees to many different sets of actors. It is also a mistake to think that judicial influence began with the charter or that it is only since. In rather loose terms, we can think about power as the joint product of impact and discretion. The law is real but it is also a figment of our imaginations. Like all fundamental social institutions it casts a shadow of popular belief that may ultimately be more significant, albeit more difficult to comprehend than the authorities, rules and penalties that we ordinarily associate with law.
