The Law & Society Reader II. Edited by Erik Larson and Patrick Schmidt. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 440 pp. $29 paper.

The Law & Society Reader II. Edited by Erik Larson and Patrick Schmidt. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 440 pp. $29 paper.This is the second reader collecting work that has been published in the Law and Society Review. The first reader, edited by Richard Abel, a founder of the law and society enterprise, covered scholarship from the inception of the Review in 1966 until 1995 when the reader was published. Abel's collection, like the Review itself, the first meeting in Buffalo in 1975, and the first international meeting in Amsterdam in 1991, marked a milestone. By the mid-1990s, scholars associated with the enterprise declared their work ready to anthologize.The articles in the second volume date from the late 1990s and run up to a few years ago. Thus, they cover a somewhat shorter period of time. The volume is edited by professors Erik Larson and Patrick Schmidt, both from Macalester College, where they are co-directors of the legal studies program. Their collection contains 43 reprinted and edited articles. This volume is perhaps less a stage in the development of the law and society enterprise than its predecessor and more of a sequel.In the Larson and Schmidt volume, there are familiar ideas about how to do social research, like counting and interviewing. They receive contemporary expressions in which they are developed and tweaked. There are also newer methods, like ethnography and the focus on constitutive law, which are tested and elaborated but also introduced and justified against the standards of the movement's relatively recent past.Although the volume does not reprint material from the first reader, it contains updated classics, like Joel Grossman, Herbert Kritzer and Stewart Macaulay's "Do the 'Haves' Still Come Out Ahead?" and what are certain to become classics such as Osagie K. Obasogie's "Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations."There is concern about crime and police always present in law and society scholarship. But not as much as there would be in a volume published now and not as much as there was in the early years. There is important work in this area by Lisa Frohman and Kitty Calavita but some major figures, like Tracey Meares of Yale Law School, who publishes in law reviews and works on policy questions, are missing because the source of these papers is "the Review."There is attention to the environment, as one would expect, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. There are some creative sections, like one on "emergent institutions" (neonatal care, truth and reconciliation, genital cutting laws). There is a section about the use of ideas in legal disputes. And there are some interesting groupings, like American Indians and fat people or blind people and women in denim, that cause one to pause in looking over the collection. But the collection maintains some of the traditional affinities like violence against women and genital cutting.The collection adds ethnography to the positivist framework that first engaged Law & Society scholars and also legal consciousness. …