Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law

by Kitty Calavita

Law and Society is a rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field that turns on its head the conventional, idealized view of the “Law” as a magisterial abstraction. Kitty Calavita’s Invitation to Law and Society brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law shapes and manifests itself in the institutions and interactions of human society, while inviting the reader into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. 

 

Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar personal examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to the use of the law in everyday life, as well as its potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. In a field of inquiry that has long lacked a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to its ways of thinking, Invitation to Law and Society will serve as an engaging and indispensible guide.

 

Genres: Law, Sociology, Nonfiction, School, Read For School, Academic

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2010

About the author

Kitty Calavita is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently studying the implementation of immigration policy in Italy and Spain. Much of her work examines the interplay of political, ideological, and economic factors in the implementation of immigration law and in the treatment of white-collar crime, and in both cases it explores what these dynamics can tell us about relations of power and state processes. Her recent article, "The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and 'Passing:' Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882-1910," Law and Social Inquiry (2000), links the everyday dilemmas of frontline immigration inspectors to contradictory assumptions about the nature of race, class, and identity. Her book, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe, published by Cambridge University Press, will be available in January, 2005.