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The Legal Malaise; or, Justice Observed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Marc Galanter
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Abstract

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During the twenty years since the founding of the Law and Society Association, a distinctive “law and society” discourse has emerged and been institutionalized in a multidisciplinary scholarly community, which has been instrumental in producing a tremendous increase in systematic knowledge about the law in action. The growth of law and society research has accompanied other changes in the distribution of information about the legal process, including a new legal journalism and greater media coverage that make the law in action more visible to a wider audience. Current distress of legal elites about the hypertrophy of legal institutions is viewed as a reaction to the increased currency of information that discredits the received picture of the legal world. The coincidence of structural changes in law with changes in the social institutions of knowledge about law creates the possibility of a more responsive and inquiring legal process.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , 1985 , pp. 537 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

This is a revised version of my presidential address, delivered at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Hotel Marriott Copley Place, Boston, June 8, 1984. I am grateful to Willard Hurst, Stewart Macaulay, Austin Sarat, John Henry Schlegel, and Susan Silbey, whose helpful and diverse responses to an intermediate version made me aware of how partial and personal is the view expressed here. I want to thank Marc Landauer for his capable assistance.

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