Are lawyers, by their very nature, agents of the state, of capital, of institutions of power? Or are there ways in which they can work constructively or transformatively for the disempowered, the working class, the underprivileged? Lawyers in a Postmodern World explores how lawyers actively create the forms of power which they and others deploy. Through engaging case studies, the book examines how lawyers work within and for powerful institutions and provides suggestions--both general and practical--for ways in which the practice of law can be made to work with and for the powerless. Individuals chapters address such subjects as the contradictions of radical law practice; legal work in South Africa; the economics and politics of negotiating justice; feminist legal scholarship and women's gendered lives; the overlapping worlds of law, business, and politics; theories of legal practice; and how lawyers are constitutive of gender relations. Contributing to the book are Maureen Cain (University of West Indies), Yves Dezalay (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Martha Fineman (Columbia University), Sue Lees (University of North London), Doreen McBarnet (Wolfson College, Oxford), Frank Munger (SUNY, Buffalo), Wilfried Scharf (University of Cape Town), Stuart Scheingold (University of Washington), David Sugarman (Lancaster University), and Sally Wheeler (University of Nottingham).
Maureen Cain is Professor of Sociology at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. She is currently writing a book on feminism and realist methodology. The author of numerous books and articles, Christene B. Harrington is an Associate Professor of Politics at New York University. She is currently writing a book on the role of the American legal profession in forming a twentieth-century administrative state.
"Books like Dorow's perform a vital role in drawing international attention to one's consequence of China's population policy." -"Journal of American Studies", "Provides an original and exciting global framework for understanding the political economy of international adoption." -Catherine Ceniza Choy, author of "Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History" "The book is useful, too, to sociologists and antropologists who seek to understand how American kinship norms and narratives are changing with America's shifting demographic landscape." -"American Journal of Sociology", "This is a fascinating project, a book that (at last!) gives the phenomenon of transnational China/U.S. adoption the sustained, serious attention that it deserves." -Laura Briggs, author of "Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico"
