Impact: How Law Affects Behavior. By Lawrence M. Friedman. Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2016.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12292
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017

arrangements tend to be explicit economic exchanges, without the

veneer of romantic love, they may rub sentimental Americans the

wrong way (p. 225).

Buying a Bride provides us with a far more nuanced picture of

the history of marital immigration. She shows us, through this his-

torical sweep, that while individual women may have benefited

from policies and laws that supported them, and in fact shaped

these policies, this was also contingent on national interest. The past

can be studied for its own sake. As Zug’s book exemplifies, though,

history can be put to normative purposes as well. Through using

the case of mail-order brides, she asks us to reconsider preconcep-

tions about marital immigration and of the laws that shaped them.

***

Impact: How Law Affects Behavior. By Lawrence M. Friedman.

Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard

University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Christine Parker, Melbourne Law School, University of

Melbourne

Lawrence Friedman begins his new book, Impact, by suggesting that

wemaybeabletosumuptheprojectalloflawandsocietyscholar-

ship in two questions. The first asks where laws come from and to

what degree they are the product of social forces or autonomous cre-

ations of law itself? It is however the second question—the impact of

these laws—that is the topic of this book. This division of the scholar-

ship into two camps is a sweeping generalization, but an insightful

one. At first Friedman says, he thought that law and society scholar-

ship seemed more concerned with where law comes from, but he

quickly realized that the impact of the law is equally important in

socio-legal scholarship. Indeed the central observation of law and

society scholarship that there is a difference between the law in the

books and the law in action is an observation about impact, albeit not

labeled as such. Criminology, regulatory compliance studies, and the

rich literature on the influence and reach of U.S. Constitutional court

decisionsareallexamplesofimpactstudies.Soisanyexplorationof

the living law, how law actually works in practice.

Friedman proceeds to summarise the law and society research

on impact in a way that is highly accessible yet also comprehensive

and rigorous. An important underlying motive for this book is

Friedman’s concluding observation that

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