Insiders, Outsiders, Injuries, and Law
Revisiting 'The Oven Bird's Song'
Published on 11. January 2018
Book
Hardback
314 pages
978-1-107-18840-2 (ISBN)
Description
A central theme of law and society is that people's ideas about law and the decisions they make to mobilize law are shaped by community norms and cultural context. But this was not always an established concept. Among the first empirical pieces to articulate this theory was David Engel's 1984 article, 'The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community'. Over thirty years later, this article is now widely considered to be part of the law and society canon. This book argues that Engel's article succeeds so brilliantly because it integrates a wide variety of issues, such as cultural transformation, attitudes about law, dispute processing, legal consciousness, rights mobilization, inclusion and exclusion, and inequality. Contributors to this volume explore the influence of Engel's important work, engaging with the possibilities in its challenging hypotheses and provocative omissions related to the legal system and legal process, class conflict and difference, and law in other cultures.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises; 5 Halftones, black and white; 2 Line drawings, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 242 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
553 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-107-18840-2 (9781107188402)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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E-Book
01/2018
Cambridge University Press
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Book
01/2018
Cambridge University Press
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E-Book
12/2017
Cambridge University Press
€26.49
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Person
Mary Nell Trautner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a National Science Foundation-funded study of how families cope and make decisions about their child's birth injuries. Her research appears in Gender and Society, American Sociological Review, Law and Policy, and other outlets.
Content
Part I. Introduction and Contextualization: 1. Revisiting the oven bird's song Mary Nell Trautner; 2. The oven bird's song: insiders, outsiders, and personal injuries in an American community David M. Engel; 3. Emulating Sherlock Holmes: the dog that didn't bark, the victim who didn't sue, and other contradictions of the 'hyper-litigious' society Barbara Yngvesson; 4. Karl's law school, or the oven bird in Buffalo Alfred S. Konefsky; Part II. The Oven Bird's Insights into the Legal System and Legal Process: 5. Challenging legal consciousness: practice, institutions, and varieties of resistance Anna-Maria Marshall; 6. Client selection: how lawyers reflect and influence community values Lynn Mather; 7. Do jurors hear the oven bird's song? Valerie P. Hans; 8. Having a right but using it too: 'The Oven Bird's Song' about contracts Stewart Macaulay; Part III. Insiders, Outsiders, Class Conflict, and Difference: 9. Indigenous litigiousness: the oven bird's song and the miner's canary Eve Darian-Smith; 10. Listening for the songs of others: insiders, outsiders, and the legal marginalization of the working underclass in America Michael McCann; 11. Racing the oven bird: criminalization, rightlessness, and the politics of immigration Jamie Longazel; 12. Irresponsible matter: sublunar dreams of injury and identity Anne Bloom; 13. Student perceptions of (their) place in relationship to 'The Oven Bird's Song' Renee Ann Cramer; Part IV. Conflict and Law in Other Cultures: 14. The songs of other birds Anya Bernstein; 15. Imagined community and litigation behavior: the meaning of automobile compensation lawsuits in Japan Yoshitaka Wada; 16. Can 'The Oven Bird' migrate north of the border? Annie Bunting; Part V. Afterward: 17. Looking backward, looking forward: past and future lives of 'The Oven Bird's Song' David M. Engel.