Stuart A. Scheingold's landmark work introduced a new understanding of the contribution of rights to progressive social movements, and thirty years later it still stands as a pioneering and provocative work, bridging political science and sociolegal studies. In the preface to this new edition, the author provides a cogent analysis of the burgeoning scholarship that has been built on the foundations laid in his original volume. A new foreword from Malcolm Feeley of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law traces the intellectual roots of The Politics of Rights to the classic texts of social...

Lawyers in the United States are frequently described as "hired guns," willing to fight for any client and advance any interest. Claiming that their own beliefs are irrelevant to their work, they view lawyering as a technical activity, not a moral or political one. But there are others, those the authors call cause lawyers, who refuse to put aside their own convictions while they do their legal work. This "deviant" strain of lawyering is as significant as it is controversial, both in the legal profession and in the world of politics. It challenges mainstream ideas of what lawyers should do...

Cause Lawyers and Social Movements seeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. It demonstrates that while all cause lawyering cuts against the grain of conventional understandings of legal practice and professionalism, social movement lawyering poses distinctively thorny problems. The editors and authors of this volume explore the following questions: What do cause lawyers do for, and to, social movements? How, when, and why do...

Cause Lawyers and Social Movements seeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. It demonstrates that while all cause lawyering cuts against the grain of conventional understandings of legal practice and professionalism, social movement lawyering poses distinctively thorny problems. The editors and authors of this volume explore the following questions: What do cause lawyers do for, and to, social movements? How, when, and why do...

Americans find street crime terrifying. Yet we seek it out in virtually all of our media: books, newspapers, television, films, and the theatre. This book confronts this cultural contradiction and asks why street crime is regarded in the trivializing images of cops and robbers that attribute crime to the willful acts of flawed individuals.

Why do politicians run on a law-and-order platform even as crime rates are falling? Why does the public respond disproportionately to law-and-order soundbites and images in the media and on TV shows? At bottom, is crime a fixed reality or a social construction? This book is the foundational and renowned study of how politicians and others use crime rates-and most of all the public perception of street crime, whether or not it is accurate-for their own purposes. Dr. Scheingold also provides a theoretical and historical basis for his views, and compares mainstream theories of crime control, as...