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

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12292
Date01 September 2017
Published date01 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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