Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights. By Lauren Edelman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12316
• Published date: 01 March 2018

Book Reviews

Jennifer Balint, Editor

Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights.By

Lauren Edelman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Carroll Seron, Department of Criminology, Law & Society,

University of California Irvine

On October 5, 2017, The New York Times ran a front-page story,

“Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for

Decades”; the investigative piece documents a pattern of sexual

harassment by Mr. Weinstein followed by at least eight settlements

with various women. We have read similar stories in high tech,

politics, journalism, academia, and other industries. In telling their

stories, many of these brave women report that they went to their

company’s Human Resources (HR) department and found the

experience remarkably unsatisfactory. For those of us who have

been following Lauren Edelman’s scholarship, the hollow and

largely symbolic reaction by HR to claims of discrimination should

come as little surprise.

Based on decades of research, Edelman’s new book, Working

Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights, concludes on the

rather pessimistic note that “we live not in a post-civil rights society

but rather in a symbolic civil rights society” (216). Wor kin g La w is a

bold and creative contribution to law and social science, social psy-

chology, organizational theory, contemporary American history, and

political science. Like many of her generation, Edelman was deeply

affected by the aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement. Her schol-

arship grows out of this commitment and takes as its starting point

the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) with a specific focus on workplace

discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Fifty years after pas-

sage of the CRA, research consistently shows that minorities and

women have not achieved parity in the labor market as measured by

earnings or mobility; indeed, since 1980 the gap has increased

(Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devy 2012). An impressivebody of social

science scholarship documents the ways in which discrimination

persists through structures that are seemingly neutral but produce

discriminatory outcomes, cultures that valorize some skills over

others, and stereotypes of the “good,” reliable often white male

Law & Society Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (2018)

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