Law 2000
In many ways, the 20th Century was law's century. Over
those one hundred years, America placed law at the center of the major
developments in the state and the economy. This was a truly vibrant and
turbulent era for both law and legal scholarship: the repudiation of
Langdellian formalism by the legal realists; the construction of the
administrative state in the New Deal, to the civil rights revolution and the
activism of the Warren Court; the litigation explosion and subsequent emergence
of neo-liberal deregulation reforms; the fall of communism and the triumphant
spread of the ideology of human rights through the globalization of law. Law
has played a crucial role in both responding to and initiating social change.
It has been deeply entangled in almost all of the important social, political,
and cultural events of this century. Changes both in law and its context have
been enormous, and legal scholarship has had a difficult time keeping up. In
recent years, it was invigorated by various interdisciplinary movements,
each seeking to connect the study of law to developments in the social sciences
and humanities. Yet the rapid pace of social and legal change poses a challenge
to scholarship. Law 2000 took stock of law's century from the vantage point of
the passing of the millenium, and looked over the horizon toward the next
century.
In October 1999, a steering group consisting of Austin
Sarat (Amherst College), Bryan Garth (American Bar Foundation), and Robert
Kagan (UC/Berkeley) convened a distinguished group of scholars from different
disciplines to assess of the evolution of law over the previous hundred years:
where it had been; how it responded to politics, society, and culture; and, in
turn, how law precipitated social and legal change. Each contributor was asked
to write about a particular area of law, or a theme in law and legal
scholarship, tracing developments and interrelated changes in the legal and the
social order. Among the topics covered were race and citizenship, individual
and group identity, crime and punishment, the legal profession, democracy and
freedom, the liberal state, corporate governance, civil society, teaching law,
and the cultural life of law.
The edited essays were published in 2002 by Cornell University Press.
The Academy of Arts and Sciences contributed funding in support of this
project.
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