Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
470
result(s) for
"Lovell, George I"
Sort by:
Covering Legal Mobilization: A Bottom-Up Analysis of Wards Cove v. Atonio
We develop a political history of Wards Cove v. Atonio (1989) to show how Robert Cover's concepts of jurisgenesis and jurispathy can enrich the legal mobilization framework for understanding law and social change. We illustrate the value of the hybrid theory by recovering the Wards Cove workers' own understanding of the role of litigation in their struggle for workplace rights. The cannery worker plaintiffs exemplified Cover's dual logic by articulating aspirational narratives of social justice and by critically rebuking the Supreme Court's ruling as the \"death throe\" for progressive minority workers' rights advocacy. The cannery workers' story also highlights the importance of integrating legal mobilization scholars' focus on extrajudicial political engagement into Cover's judge-centered analysis. Our aim is to forge a theoretical bridge between Cover's provocative arguments about law and the analytical tradition of social science scholarship on the politics of legal mobilization.
Journal Article
The Myth of the Myth of Rights
Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights provided a path-breaking theoretical analysis of what he called the “myth of rights.” Scheingold's key insight was that even though rights were a myth, rights ideologies nevertheless left a significant imprint on American politics. The book charted a research agenda that has now been followed by a wide range of sociolegal scholars. Looking across that diverse body scholarship, I find convergence on two points. First, scholars claim that law and legal ideology contribute to processes of legitimation and to political acquiescence. Second, and seemingly in tension with the first, most people do not appear to believe in idealized legal myths and express only qualified commitments to legal ideals. Most scholars have responded to this tension by downplaying evidence that people have doubts about legal ideals, often treating expressions of doubts as evidence of confusion. As a result, scholars still conclude that residual commitments to legal myths help to explain legitimation and acquiescence. Such moves produce accounts of legal myths that are insufficiently attentive to politics and power. Scholars would do better to return to Scheingold's more ambivalent perspective on the politics of rights in order to understand the political consequences of commitments to rights’ ideologies.
Book Chapter
Justice Excused: The Deployment of Law in Everyday Political Encounters
This paper examines the use of legal claims by government officials and citizens in everyday political encounters involving civil rights. Data come from 580 letters sent to the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and from the replies sent by the newly formed Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. In almost every case, the department refused to intervene and explained its refusal by making legal claims about federal jurisdiction. These legal claims masked the department's discretionary choices and thus helped depoliticize the encounters. Surprisingly, however, a substantial number of letter writers challenged the government's legal claims by deploying their own legal and moral arguments. The willingness of these citizens to challenge official legal pronouncements cautions against making broad generalizations about the capacity of ordinary people to respond effectively when government officials deploy legal rhetoric.
Journal Article
Understanding the impact and visibility of ideological change on the supreme court
This chapter offers an explanation for the mixed record of the Supreme Court since the 1960s, and considers the implications of that record for the future. The chapter emphasizes that judicial power is connected to choices made by other political actors. We argue that conventional ways of measuring the impact of Court rulings and the Court's treatment of precedents are misleading. The Court cannot be understood as a counter-majoritarian protector of rights. In both past and future, electoral outcomes determine the policy areas in which the Court will be influential, and also the choices the justices make about how to portray their treatment of law and precedents.
Book Chapter
Reflections on a Funhouse Mirror—Racist Violence, the Protection of Privilege, and the Limits of Tolerance
Jeannine Bell's Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing provides an account of racist violence as a tool for maintaining housing segregation that challenges perceptions of rising tolerance and demonstrates the importance of understanding racism as a structural feature of social organization. Bell shows how some perpetrators of move in violence deploy claims about \"property values\" as a defense against charges of racism. The use of such claims starkly illustrates how colorblind racism allows assertions of racial privilege to resonate as neutral articulations of rational self-interest. The desire to defend racial privileges persists as a significant practical barrier to racial equality even when tolerance increases.
Book Review
Justice Excused
In June 1939, Layle Lane wrote to U.S. Attorney General Frank Murphy to ask the Justice Department to investigate the case of Elijah Harris. According to Lane, Harris was being held in a prison camp in Everglades, Florida, after allegedly being involved in a car accident in which a white child had died. Lane reported that Harris had not received a fair trial, that he already had paid fines that were supposed to result in his freedom, and that he was receiving brutal treatment. Lane also suggested that Florida was operating a forced labor camp and extorting money from the
Book Chapter