The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought

Are we approaching the end of a period in American life when the role of law in social and cultural life has reached and passed its peak? Are law and legal scholarship undergoing a period of rupture in which accepted paradigms and familiar assumptions no longer seem satisfactory? What will happen to law in the face of careful, critical examination of its ideological dimensions, its role in constituting social relations, its particular literary and linguistic features, and its special role in domesticating and dispensing force and violence? Can law, braced by its encounters with intellectual currents in the humanities and social sciences and with feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory, turn outward and secure new grounding? The books in The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought take up these questions and examine law from an interdisciplinary perspective. Each of the books published in the series considers a theme crucial to the understanding of law as it confronts the twenty-first century or to the understanding of contemporary challenges to law and legal scholarship. The books offer original essays prepared by distinguished scholars. This series is closed.