Law and Society Commons^™

Foreword: Telling Stories, Kim Lane Schepple

Michigan Law Review

Why is there such a rush to storytelling? Why has narrative become such an important and recurring theme in legal scholarship these days?

This issue testifies to the attractiveness of, and limits to, storytelling as a force in law. But whose stories are told? Who listens? And who responds? This symposium explores these questions, challenging traditional practices and exploring new ones in the telling of stories in the law. One important lesson that can be learned from this issue is that narrative is a way of organizing, coping with, even acting on the world. Stories carry power because they have …

Public Response To Racist Speech: Considering The Victim's Story, Mari J. Matsuda

Michigan Law Review

The threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi skinheads goes beyond their repeated acts of illegal violence. Their presence and the active dissemination of racist propaganda means that citizens are denied personal security and liberty as they go about their daily lives. Professor Richard Delgado recognized the harm of racist speech in his breakthrough article, Words That Wound, in which he suggested a tort remedy for injury from racist words. This Article takes inspiration from Professor Delgado's position, and makes the further suggestion that formal criminal and administrative sanction - public as opposed to private …

Storytelling For Oppositionists And Others: A Plea For Narrative, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

This essay examines the use of stories in the struggle for racial reform. Part I shows how we construct social reality by devising and passing on stories - interpretive structures by which we impose order on experience and it on us. To illustrate how stories structure reality, I choose a single race-tinged event and tell it in the form of five stories or narratives. Each account is followed by analysis, showing what the story includes and leaves out and how it perpetuates one version of social reality rather than another. Part II deals with counterstories, competing versions that can be …

The Final Report: Harvard's Affirmative Action Allegory, Derrick Bell

Michigan Law Review

Harvard's affirmative action allegory written for this symposium.

Contradiction And Denial, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies by Mark Kelman

Law And Disputing In Commercializing Early America, Cornelia Dayton

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut by Bruce H. Mann

Hardly The Trial Of The Century, Franklin E. Zimring

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial by George P. Fletcher

Foundering On The Seas Of Hopelessness, Mary C. Dunlap

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law by Richard D. Mohn

Trial By Ordeal, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal by Robert Bartlett

Transfers Of Property In Eleventh-Century Norman Law, William John Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law by Emily Zack Tabuteau

The Politics Of Victimization Makes Strange Bedfellows, Jennifer L. Hochschild

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims by Kristin Bumiller, and Plural But Equal: Blacks and Minorities in America's Plural Society by Harold Cruse

Privacy In A Public Society: Human Rights In Conflict, David Clark Esseks

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict by Richard F. Hixson

Protection Of Civil Rights: A Constitutional Mandate For The Federal Government, Julius Chambers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South by Michal Belknap

Deconstructing Gender, Joan C. Williams

Michigan Law Review

I start out, as have many others, from the deep split among American feminists between "sameness" and "difference." The driving force behind the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of American feminism was an insistence on the fundamental similarity of men and women and, hence, their essential equality.

I begin in Part I by challenging the widely influential description of gender advocated by Carol Gilligan. While Part I challenges the description of gender differences offered by Gilligan feminists, it does not deny the existence of gender differences. The chief strength of the feminism of difference is its challenge to what have been called male …

The Future Of Liberal Legal Scholarship, Ronald K.L. Collins, David M. Skover

Michigan Law Review

Earl Warren is dead.

A generation of liberal legal scholars continues, nevertheless, to act as if the man and his Court preside over the present. While this romanticism is understandable, it exacts a high price in a world transformed.

The following commentary is a reconstructive criticism written from the perspective of two liberals concerned about the future of "legal liberalism." We present our views as a commentary to emphasize their preliminary character; they represent our current assessment of where liberals stand and where they might redirect their energies.

And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest For Racial Justice, Kevin Edward Kennedy

Michigan Law Review

A Review of And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice by Derrick A. Bell

Abortion And Divorce In Western Law, Sara J. Vance

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Abortion and Divorce in Western Law by Mary A. Glendon

Legislatures And Legal Change: The Reform Of Divorce Law, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Silent Revolution: Routine Policy Making and the Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States by Herbert Jacob

The Closing Of The American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy And Impoverished The Souls Of Today's Students, Maureen P. Taylor

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students/em by Allan Bloom