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.

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

This book assembles the world's most authoritative specialists for a comparative analysis of the enforcement of corporate and securities laws in thirteen national jurisdictions. It examines the enforcement of corporate and securities laws across the globe and across different legal and political systems from an in-depth comparative perspective.

The Law in Action in Democratic Athens is the first extensive study of the importance of the rule of law in Athenian democracy.