"Baumgartner provides a uniquely valuable collection of the best research in legal sociology. No previous volume so beautifully introduces and illustrates the power of general theory to predict and explain the actual behavior of law."
DONALD BLACK, University of Virginia "Mary Baumgartner's volume is a wonderfully catalytic collection of contributions that illustrates the dynamic growth and organizational stimulus that ... Read moreDonald Black's theory of law has brought to the field of legal sociology."
JOHN HAGAN, University of Toronto "In the Second Edition of The Social Organization of Law, M.P. Baumgartner assembles a set of first-rate empirical studies to illuminate how social factors affect legal behavior. The introduction alone is worth the price of the volume. The Social Organization of Law will undoubtedly join its predecessor as a benchmark of knowledge in the sociology of law."
CALVIN MORRILL, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona "Few social theorists, American or European, contemporary or classical, have developed as methodically as has Donald Black a single line of inquiry. Fewer still, Durkheim included, have applied a structural theory as broadly, from law to moral and aesthetic judgment. Baumgartner's eminently readable collection demonstrates what Black's approach can accomplish, offering us predictions or explanations covering appeals court rulings, controls on rap music, regulatory discretion, personal injury outcomes, law in Colonial America and contemporary China, and the persecution of early Christians."
DAVID SCIULLI, Department of Sociology, Texas A & M University "A thoughtfully revised collection, elaborating, specifying and clarifying the behavioral theory of law, Baumgartner's Social Organization of Law should be fundamental reading in socio-legal studies."
PETER K. MANNING, Michigan State University Show Less