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Community Justice, Capitalist Society, and Human Agency: The Dialectics of Collective Law in the Cooperative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Stuart Henry
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Abstract

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This paper examines the relationship between social structures and community justice. It rejects both those arguments that see community justice as independent experiments for the development of an alternative system of justice and those that see such experiments as functioning solely in the interests of dominant legal and social structures. Based on a study of the collective justice systems of a variety of small-scale cooperatives, the paper develops a theory in which community justice is shown to be ambiguously related to the larger system in which it is set and to the groups and individuals who make up that system. This ambiguity, it is argued, is capable of transforming the wider structure, and the theory allows us to glimpse a potential for broad-based socio-legal change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , 1985 , pp. 303 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

This paper is the outcome of my dialectical interchanges with a number of scholars, each of whom has claimed some of my territory as I have claimed some of theirs. Their influence should be apparent throughout but I acknowledge special thanks to Richard Abel, Richard Lempert, Rue Bendall, Peter Fitzpatrick, Nigel South and Brian Hipkin. An earlier version of the paper was presented at a meeting of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, International Sociological Association Conference, University of Antwerp, September 9, 1983. The present version, in somewhat shortened form, was presented to the American Society of Criminology Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, November 7, 1984. I wish to thank the British Economic and Social Research Council for funding the research on which the paper was based with grant no. HR5907/2.

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