Law and the order of culture

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived

We have long been accustomed to think of law as something apart. The grand ideals of justice, of impartiality and fairness, have seemed to remove law from the ordinary, disordered paths of life. For this reason efforts to unearth connections between law and culture have appeared vaguely tinged with exposé, as though the idol were revealed to have merely human feet. In recent years, with a firmer sense of the encompassing inevitability of culture, the scandal has diminished, and the enterprise of actually tracing the uneasy relationship of law to culture has begun in earnest.