Still, at the Margins

Still, at the Margins Austin Sarat, ed., The Social Organization of Law: Introductory Readings. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Co., 2004. 596 pp. $65.95 paper. In one of many traditions of critical race scholarship, this review opens with a first-person narrative. When I was asked to review Austin Sarat's new compilation of introductory readings on law and society at the "Change" breakfast of the 2004 annual Law and Society Association meeting in Chicago, I responded affirmatively but with rather tepid enthusiasm, which reflected-as I recall-the level of enthusiasm I felt for the conference overall, despite (or perhaps because of) it being my third year in attendance at the notoriously large and panel-packed meeting. When I was asked further to review the compilation specifically from a "critical race perspective," my lack of enthusiasm quickly transformed to discomfort, and I wanted to immediately revoke my acceptance of the offer to do the review. Even those who do not identify as "race crits" or "fern race crits"-as I do-are likely aware that law and society is known in certain academic circles for being overwhelmingly liberal (and, therefore, not critical) and overwhelmingly white. Moreover, although certainly many race crits do consider themselves part of this large, scholarly community and while I always enjoyed participating in and attending various panels, up to that point I had never sought to make law and society my intellectual "home." As a result, in being asked to review Sarat's new book, I felt both flattered and doomed-flattered because I was being called upon for my "expertise" as a race crit who could write intelligently about the book, and doomed because I was an outsider being invited in, however briefly, to criticize a principal player-an insider's insider-in the law and society movement. It was a classic micro-dilemma of "subject unrest" (Gulp et al. 2003:2435)-I wanted in and wanted out at the same time, for all the right and wrong reasons. In the moments when I contemplated changing my mind, my tendency toward melodrama gave way to my inability to say no and, more seriously, to my feeling that someone should write a critical race review of the book. But my feelings of ambivalence toward this review, even as I write it, have not diminished, and I am all too aware of my positionality as an outsider to the law and society community. This disclosure of outsider positionality is an important one because it frames the substantive critique of this review. Mission and Audience The Social Organization of Law is aimed at students, both at undergraduate students who are interested in becoming lawyers or in the legal system more generally, and at law students interested in the interconnectedness of law and society. In his introduction, Sarat sets forth the text's basic premise, that "law seeks to work in the world" (p. 1), and he describes the two ways in which the collection aims to explain how law does so: First, the readings in this book highlight law's responsiveness to various dimensions of social stratification. They draw attention to the question of when, why, and how legal decisions respond to social characteristics (e.g., race, class, gender) of those making the decisions as well as those who are subject to them and when, why, and how they should do so. ... Second, the book treats law itself as a social organization, emphasizing the complex relations among its various component parts (e.g., judges and jurors, police and prosecutors, appellate and trial courts). . . . (p. 1). Sarat thematically organizes his anthology around the law's paradoxes. That is, the law works to be "impartial and evenhanded" but also "sympathetic and responsive"; accessible and efficient but not overly so; deterrent of socially unacceptable behaviors but also equitable toward the perpetrators of such conduct; and, most significantly, controlling of violence and also of the sort of discretion thought necessary to control that violence (p. …