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Many of America's most important social and political movements--abolition, women's suffragette, civil rights, women's liberation, gay and lesbian rights--have organized in the shadow of the law. All are based in their theoretical opposition to the law. Yet at the same time, they are dependent on the laws that prohibit them. Law is thus formed as much through the dynamic tensions that govern how these laws are received as through their official decree.
Legal forms such as contracts, property, and rights also constitute social and political life because they structure our world. John Brigham here focuses on four ideological movements and their strategies, among them the struggle over the closing of gay bathhouses in the early years of the AIDS crisis and the radical feminist use of rage and radical consciousness in anti- pornography campaigns. The effect of law on politics, Brigham convincingly reveals, is pervasive precisely because political life finds its expression in a surprising variety of legal forms.

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CHOICE Review

This sequel to Brigham's The Cult of the Court (CH, Jan'88) and Civil Liberties and American Democracy (CH, Sep'84), highlights the premier role of law in many of the US's social and political movements (e.g., abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, gay/ lesbian rights, opposition to pornography, and abortion). These issues are examined in light of radicalism/conservatism, realism/idealism, and informalism/legalism. Presenting an elitist picture of law, courts, and professionals whose training gives them special authority, Brigham engages in a discourse about law and politics at the philosophical, ideological, and epistemological levels. The "constitution of interests" goes beyond the "politics of rights," finding influences of law that go unnoticed at the level of consciousness affecting one's social and political life, whether in business, family, education, or literature. Both the Critical Legal Studies and Alternative Dispute Resolution movements are oriented toward procedural rather than substantive aspects of the law. Even the struggle against law (e.g., abolition, antipornography) had the law's form, directed against the courts, judges, and doctrines of law. Brigham presents seminal works by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as voices for a new jurisprudence to reshape politics and society around new strategies and techniques. He concludes: "the extent to which `interests' have been defined as having feelings or demands rather than knowledge is a powerful agent for maintaining authority relations." Highly recommended for graduate students and faculty in law, philosophy, and political science, and for professional and law school libraries. C. G. Hess; Lander University