What is Law and Society?: Definitional Disputes

• Author: Susan M. Sterett
• Pages: 3-17

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction: Law as Authority, Law as Field

Jerome Frank, the legal realist lawyer who worked for the Roosevelt administration

in the United States in the 1930s, wrote Law and the Modern Mind (Frank 2009

[1930]) just before the United States New Deal. In it he scrutinized the longing for law

as a clear, final, authoritative statement. Frank acknowledged that laypeople found

the law “uncertain, indefinite and subject to incalculable changes,” and the uncer-

tainty contributed to most people’s disenchantment with law. He wondered why peo-

ple would expect anything different. Why was finding uncertainty even a criticism of

law and lawyers? Frank scrutinized the longing for finality through a psychoanalytic

lens, and argued that it was a longing for a father who ac ted as a final authority against

the “reasonless, limitless and indeterminate aspects of life.” He argued that the belief

in authority persisted despite our repeatedly finding that t here was seldom a stopping

point in legal argument. Legal judgments may stop a story, but they are not the end of

law. The stopping points can have dramatic consequences for people, whether in

deportations, dissolution of marriages, formation of companies, or imprisonment

and death. Actors recontextualize legal orders, giving them new meanings. The

futility of the search for clear authority or an end to legal argument that Frank found

ordinary took on a more ominous tone with the rise of fascism.

An alternative to the longing for authority Frank analyzed is law as a semi‐

autonomous field intertwined with all the other ways that people and institutions

constitute meaning. The legal anthropologist Sally Fal k Moore led us to think of a

field as a site of research that allows us to see both the presence and the absence of

law; entering a “semi‐autonomous field” allowed one to analyze how laws were pro-

duced and gained authority through relationships (Moore 1978). She acknowledged

What is Law and Society?

Definitional Disputes

Susan M. Sterett

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