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Right, Rage, and Remedy: Forms of Law in Political Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

John Brigham
John Brigham
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Extract

When political activists talk about strategy and when they address each other, legal forms are an integral part of their language. Some movements, like alternative dispute resolution, build on a general critique of the legal process. Others, like gay rights, seek to fulfill legal promises or, as in the feminist antipornography campaign, they present broadsides against the law's oppression. These ideas about law are not bound in standard law books; but they give meaning to social relations, and they must be understood as significant parts of the legal order. To attend to them is to illuminate a part of law's social reality and, more specifically, to see how law informs social action. Such ideas and the relations they create are law in society.

Type
Notes and Exchanges
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 303 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

I gratefully acknowledge comments on earlier drafts by Stuart Scheingold, Isaac Balbus, Phyllis Farley Rippey, Sally Merry, Austin Sarat, and Christine Harrington.

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