This text is designed for law students and for courses in legal studies programs. The reader deals in depth with the relationship between the legal system and its surrounding society, including such classic issues as the social sources of law and the impact of legal rules and institutions on society. Other chapters examine the role of judges and lawyers in the system and how culture and historical tradition help mold the legal systems of various societies. The book contains six chapters, each containing classic and contemporary readings on these subjects, with extensive notes and questions to guide the student.

'Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise' explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action', the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action', an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be, not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other forms of legal writing, but a multifaceted genre of legal literature in its own right, practical and fanciful, dogmatic and ornamental in turn. This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.

Ethnomethodologists and Conversation Analysts have always been interested in the study of law and legal institutions and there is now a large body of empirical studies, representing a range of analytic traditions in each field. This collection introduces this literature and the research questions pursued by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts, in an accessible form to a general audience in the inter-disciplinary field of law and society studies.

This is a book of papers and interviews about innovative law school courses developed by faculty of the Wisconsin Law School from 1950 to 1970 that forged a path from legal realism to law and social science. These courses took a “law in action” approach to the study of law which became a signature feature of the school’s tradition from that time to the present day. “The Legal Realists of the 1920s and 30s taught that the law that mattered was the law in action, as applied by ordinary officials and experienced by ordinary people. But they mostly failed to get their program adopted as part of professional education alongside the study of appellate cases. Only at Wisconsin—thanks to a cluster of great scholar-teachers in Willard Hurst, Frank Remington, Herman Goldstein, Stewart Macaulay, Bill Whitford, and their collaborators—has the Realist vision been fully and splendidly realized in law teaching. This is the story of that thrilling experiment.” — Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law Emeritus, Stanford University; Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School “This book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the law and society movement and the unique role that the University of Wisconsin Law School has played in that tradition. In a series of essays by and interviews of current and former Wisconsin law teachers, the creativity of Wisconsin’s challenge to the traditional legal academy comes alive.” — Lauren Edelman, Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley "In a time when an increasing number of law schools characterize themselves as bastions of 'law in action,' this volume provides a bracing reminder of a more precise vision. That vision was rooted in the legal realist tradition during an earlier 'golden age' of sociolegal thought at the University of Wisconsin Law School. In this important book, we hear vivid accounts of the innovative law teaching during that time, which took realist discoveries seriously—in Contracts, Legal Process, Legal History, and Criminal Law.” — Elizabeth Mertz, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation; John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerita, UW-Madison Law School