From Legal Realism to Law and Society: Reshaping Law for the Last Stages of the Social Activist State

This article tells the story of the establishment of the Law and Society Association in the early to mid-1960s. To tell the story, the authors concentrate on the personal stories of the individuals active in that early period and on four university campus sites—the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin—at which much of the impetus was focused. They also examine key institutions that funded and/or encouraged links between law and social science—the Russell Sage Foundation, the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law, and the American Bar Foundation. The article seeks also to investigate more generally the factors that came together to build a field of law and social science—which in turn helped to provide the ideas and build the institutions involved in the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The field was created in part by a process involving both competition and cooperation between law and social science over the new terrain of social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. The authors suggest that, over time, the center of gravity of the field moved toward law, leaving the social science disciplines for the most part outside. The development of the field generally was also affected by the strong shift in the relative values of these social sciences—especially sociology—in relation to economics in the 1980s.