Richard Abel

• University of California, Los Angeles

The rule of law is a foundation of the liberal state. The US ‘War on Terror’ under Presidents Bush and Obama threatened and violated the rule of law in multiple ways. This article surveys those challenges and analyses how US institutions responded in order to assess the capacity of the legal system to resist political pressure in moments of crisis.

I taught torts and legal profession at six US law schools over the course of forty years (1969–2008). This paper describes my efforts to incorporate socio-legal studies and critical legal studies into my teaching and my reflections on how successful this was.

Martin Krygier's scholarship has inspired a broad swathe of work on the rule of law. In two recent books, I sought to understand the successes and failures of efforts to defend the rule of law in the US “war on terror.” This essay summarizes the lessons I learned.

Cambridge Core - American Government, Politics and Policy - Law's Wars - by Richard L. Abel

Cambridge Core - Socio-Legal Studies - Law's Trials - by Richard L. Abel

Scholarly and academic commentators have been warning of a “crisis” in American legal education since the beginning of the 2008 recession. This article critically examines what they mean by a “crisis”, whether the evidence supports their claims, and the responses they propose.

In the final decade of the twentieth century the legal profession witnessed profound changes. First the Conservatives sought to apply laissez-faire principles to the profession. Then Labour transformed the legal aid scheme it had created half a century earlier. At the same time, the profession confronted cumulative changes in higher education and w...

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Lawyer misconduct affects many people: clients, adversaries, opposing counsel, judges, the legal profession, and society at large. The records of disciplinary proceedings offer a penetrating, and largely ignored, perspective on how lawyers misbehave. Because the lawyers' professional lives are at stake, the factual records are extraordinarily detai...

This review analyzes four decades of law-and-society scholarship by examining and contrasting the first and last 13 years of the Law & Society Review (LSR). It compares the programmatic statements of Law and Society Association presidents and LSR editors with the scholarship published, offering explanations for and critiques of project and practice...

Many professions displayed indifference to or complicity with the Bush administration's abuses. Many of the few professionals who resisted did so individually or in marginalized groups, moved by political commitments or ethical beliefs acquired outside the profession. Most government officials - especially those in the military - voiced objections...

Our legal system is built on the trustworthiness of lawyers: clients must trust their fidelity, adversaries their undertakings, and courts the veracity of their legal and factual claims. Lawyers who betray trust undermine these foundations. Although legal scholars focus on refining the ethical rules, we know very little about the nature and reasons...

Redistributing laywers' services is a principal focus of efforts to reform contemporary legal systems. Such reforms generally attempt to modify the market distribution in oneof two ways: by subsidizing lawyers for the unrepresented, or by rendering lawyers unnecessary through deprofessionalization. This essay analyzes the contribution that redistri...

Lawyers (especially criminal defense counsel) are often asked: "How can you represent these clients?" Common law lawyers-especially American-respond by invoking "The Adversary System Excuse." They are hired guns, compelled by the "principle of professionalism" to advocate vigorously while being absolved of moral responsibility by the "principle of...

Professor Abel's title, a reference to theories of underdevelopment (e.g., Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974)), is intended to suggest that Third World legal professions did not somehow fail to “develop”—they are not poor copies of Western models—but rather were underdeveloped, i.e., th...

The author surveys and compares the legal professions of 15 nations, including both civil law and common law countries. The essay is organized around the ways that legal professionals control their markets—first by controlling “production of producers” or who and how many enter the profession (with formal education or apprenticeship requirements, e...

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This article explores the crisis of professionalism at the end of the twentieth century by posing seven questions. First, how has the reconfiguration of professional categories— membership, productive structures, clienteles, substantive and functional specialisation, training and credentialling—redefined the“professional project”?7 Second, professi...

The feminist campaign against pornography, the furor over a racial epithet in the O. J. Simpson trial, and Iran's continuing threat to kill Salman Rushdie exemplify the intense passions aroused by hurtful speech. Richard Abel offers an original framework for understanding and attempting to resolve these pervasive and intractable conflicts. Drawing...

The lineaments of the contemporary American legal profession profoundly shape the functioning of the legal system and the quality of justice it produces. Legal specialists play an indispensable role in mediating the interaction between Americans and their laws. This is not true of all legal systems; rather, it is one manifestation of the highly dev...

The concept of “customary law” often is used to refer to a particular kind of legal rule—one that is oral rather than written, for instance. Such a conception contains a kernel of truth—customary rules are distinctive—but the focus is too narrow. In this essay I want to look at the totality of legal phenomena in a society—rules, processes, institut...

This collection, which brings together critical reviews of the literature on a variety of contemporary issues in law and social science, has its origins in two judgments about our field that may appear contradictory but in fact are complementary. On the one hand, the empirical data and generalizations produced during the last several decades seem t...

The essays in this volume offer a wealth of suggestions for new directions in sociolegal research, not only about the particular subjects they themselves address but also, by analogy, about many others. Here I want to approach the task of theoretical reorientation in a different way. While these essays were in progress I had occasion to attempt a c...

The emergence and transformation of disputes, especially before they enter formal legal institutions, is a neglected topic in the sociology of law. We provide a framework for studying the processes by which unperceived injurious experiences are—or are not—perceived (naming), do or do not become grievances (blaming) and ultimately disputes (claiming...

Why study the legal systems of other times or places? Are there reasons beyond an antiquarianism or exoticism that seeks stimulation for a palate jaded by preoccupation with the minutiae of American law? The increased understanding to be gained by such intellectual exploration seems to me similar in origin to the pleasure any of us takes in travel....