NCJ Number
78965
Date Published
1976
Length
189 pages
Annotation
This book analyzes the current liberal movement in English law by examining sociolegal studies and considers the relationships of law and a capitalist political economy.
Abstract
The primary theme of the book is that law, as it is currently practiced and taught, involves the increasing domination of citizen's lives by legal processes devised and controlled by legal 'experts'. The liberal legal movement proposes to use the law to attack socioeconomic injustice and right all that is wrong with society. While law may be used to ameliorate the harshness of an authoritarian society, it can do little to change the basic socioeconomic forces that persistently produce oppression of the proletariat in a capitalist society. The discussion shows that the lawyer's world is law-centered and that the lawyer can only describe reality and history in terms of solutions to 'legal problems.' The practical effects of this view are indicated by an analysis of various schemes to help people through legal action, notably through the duty solicitor and neighborhood law schemes. The practice and teaching of law under the belief that society can be molded by legal actions are also analyzed. The concluding chapter advises persons to free their destinies from dependence upon legal definitions of reality by first attacking the reification of the law, legal institutions, legal processes, and the lawyer's role in society. The reactions to law described represent either attempts to establish a measure of control over law by constructing a law that does not repress the proletariat or to build alternative institutions and develop alternative ways of acting upon the world to benefit those who are oppressed and powerless under the current legal structures. Under this perspective, the trial is presented as a forum for presenting a vision of the recreated world being obstructed by the existing legal system. The political defendant in the political trial is analyzed under this ideology. Footnotes are listed for each chapter. (Author summary modified)