Afterword: Studying Litigation And Social Change

1 Reviewing law and society research a decade ago, Richard Abel (1980) argued that concern for legal effectiveness, a concern embedded in the ideological premises of the legal system itself, so dominated theories about law and social change that research was limited to impact studies--studies that examined the law's effectiveness in producing behavior conforming with legal norms.In a related criticism, Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey (1988) have suggested that the field's fascination with policy questions focused law and society research on the gap between legal ideals and institutional practices.Studies of law and social change, they argued, ignored both the law's displacement of alternative conceptions of order and its constitutive role in maintaining the everyday and routine patterns of social life.Both criticisms have suggested that research on law and social change has often served to reinforce the ideological premises for the legal system itself.2 Although Abel uses the term "function" to describe the role of legal institutions in society, feedback mechanisms seldom exist to link the effects of law with the behavior of participants in legal institutions.Thus, "functional" is inappropriate as a formal theoretical concept describing law's causal role.Nor do I believe that Abel uses the term in its formal sense.As I discuss further in note 7, the purposive and instrumental quality of legal behavior is captured better by another theoretical concept, "intentional" causation.