The Law & Society Reader II. Edited by Erik Larson and Patrick Schmidt. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 440 pp. $29 paper.

• Date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12170
• Published date: 01 December 2015

Book Reviews

Jinee Lokaneeta, Editor

The Law & Society Reader II. Edited by Erik Larson and Patrick

Schmidt. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 440 pp.

$29 paper.

Reviewed by John Brigham, Department of Political Science,

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This is the second reader collecting work that has been published in

the Law and Society Review. The first reader, edited by Richard Abel, a

founder of the law and society enterprise, covered scholarship from

the inception of the Review in 1966 until 1995 when the reader was

published. Abel’s collection, like the Review itself, the first meeting in

Buffalo in 1975, and the first international meeting in Amsterdam in

1991, marked a milestone. By the mid-1990s, scholars associated

with the enterprisedeclared their work ready to anthologize.

The articles in the second volume date from the late 1990s and

run up to a few years ago. Thus, they cover a somewhat shorter

period of time. The volume is edited by professors Erik Larson

and Patrick Schmidt, both from Macalester College, where they are

co-directors of the legal studies program. Their collection contains

43 reprinted and edited articles. This volume is perhaps less a

stage in the development of the law and society enterprise than its

predecessor and more of a sequel.

In the Larson and Schmidt volume, there are familiar ideas

about how to do social research, like counting and interviewing.

They receive contemporary expressions in which they are devel-

oped and tweaked. There are also newer methods, like ethnogra-

phy and the focus on constitutive law, which are tested and

elaborated but also introduced and justified against the standards

of the movement’s relatively recent past.

Although the volume does not reprint material from the first

reader,it contain s updated classics, likeJoel Grossman, Herbert Kritzer

and Stewart Macaulay’s “Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead?” and

what are certain to become classics such as Osagie K. Obasogie’s “Do

Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations.”

There is concern about crime and police always present in law

and society scholarship. But not as much as there would be in a

Law & Society Review, Volume 49, Number 4 (2015)

V

C2015 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

1023