Law and Society is a rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field that turns on its head the conventional, idealized view of the “Law” as a magisterial abstraction. Kitty Calavita’s Invitation to Law and Society brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law shapes and manifests itself in the institutions and interactions of human society, while inviting the reader into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. 
Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar personal examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to the use of the law in everyday life, as well as its potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. In a field of inquiry that has long lacked a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to its ways of thinking, Invitation to Law and Society will serve as an engaging and indispensible guide.

Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Calavita, Kitty

University of Chicago Press

Law and society is a rapidly growing field that turns the conventional view of law as mythical abstraction on its head. Kitty Calavita brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law is found not only in statutes and courtrooms but in our institutions and interactions, while inviting readers into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to both law as it is written and actual legal practices, as well as the law’s potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. With this second edition of Invitation to Law and Society, Calavita brings up to date what is arguably the leading introduction to this exciting, evolving field of inquiry and adds a new chapter on the growing law and cultural studies movement.

Invitation to Law and Society, Second Edition: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (After the Law)

Sweeping reforms in immigration policy over the last decade have led to heightened public awareness of this controversial issue. Inside the State takes the reader behind the scenes inside the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) - one of the most secretive agencies in the federal government, and one which wields enormous discretionary power. Kitty Calavita documents the internal decision-making processes of the INS that have shaped U.S. policy, and places the current reform movement in historical and theoretical perspective. Using internal government documents accessed through the Freedom of Information Act and never before published, Kitty Calavita examines the agency's operation of the program that imported over five million Mexican farmworkers or "braceros" to California, Texas and other southwestern states between 1942 and 1964. She traces the INS' operation of the Bracero program and the informal policymaking process that set its parameters. In its role as official gatekeeper, the agency controlled entries, departures, and desertions, exerting power not only over the braceros themselves, but ultimately over the entire program. This study reveals that the braceros, admitted under contract for limited periods of time and by definition captive to their employers, were considered an ideal source of cheap labor for U.S. agriculture. The INS used its substantial administrative power - and often stretched the letter of the law - to maximize the program's utility to employers. Connecting structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decision-making, Inside the State provides one of the first in-depth analyses of the links between abstract theories of the state and real-life political actors and institutions. It will appeal to a wide range of academic researchers and state theorists, as well as immigration lawyers and immigrant rights advocates.

Reference

Routledge

"Inside the State" takes the reader behind the scenes inside the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) - one of the most secretive agencies in the federal government, and one which wields enormous discretionary power. Kitty Calavita documents the internal decision-making processes of the INS that have shaped US policy, and places the current reform movement in historical and theoretical perspective. Connecting structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decision-making, "Inside the State" aims to provide in-depth analyses of the links between abstract theories of the state and real-life political actors and institutions.

Legal History

Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

This provocative volume explores immigration law in Spain and Italy, and exposes the tension between the temporary legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. It demonstrates the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor--carefully inscribed in law--and their social exclusion and racialization. At the broadest level, the book engages questions of citizenship and belonging in this global era. It uniquely combines analysis of immigration laws and immigrants' daily experiences.

Constitutional Law

Cambridge University Press

At a cost of $500 billion to American taxpayers, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was the worst financial crisis of the twentieth century as well as a crime unparalleled in American history. Yet the vast majority of its perpetrators will never be prosecuted, and those who were have received minimal sentences. In the first in-depth scrutiny of the ways and means of this disaster, this groundbreaking book comes to disturbing conclusions about the deliberate nature of this financial fraud, the political collusion involved, and the leniency of the criminal justice system in dealing with these "Gucci-clad white-collar criminals." Using material from over one hundred interviews with government officials and industry leaders and recently declassified documents, the authors show how—contrary to previous government and "expert" explanations that chalked the disaster up to business risks gone awry or adverse economic conditions—S&amp;L leaders engaged in deliberate fraud, stealing from their own corporations to speculate on high-risk ventures. Tempted by the insurance net, perpetrators looted their own institutions in a new kind of white-collar crime the authors dub "collective embezzlement." Big Money Crime also demonstrates how systematic political collusion—not just policy errors—was a critical ingredient in this unprecedented series of frauds. Bringing together statistics from a variety of government agencies, the authors provide a close reading of the track record of prosecutions and sentencing and find that "suite crime" receives much more lenient treatment than "street crime," despite its significantly higher price tag. The book concludes with a number of modest, but no less urgent, policy recommendations to counter the current deregulatory trend and to avert a replay of the S&amp;L debacle in other financial sectors. FROM THE BOOK:"We built thick walls; we have cameras; we have time clocks on the vaults . . . all these controls were to protect against somebody stealing the cash. Well, you can steal far more money, and take it out the back door. The best way to rob a bank is to own one."—House Committee on Government Operations, 1988

Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis

Business & Money

Pontell, Henry N.

Tillman, Robert

Economics

University of California Press

At a cost of $500 billion to American taxpayers, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was the worst financial crisis of the twentieth century as well as a crime unparalleled in American history. Yet the vast majority of its perpetrators will never be prosecuted, and those who were have received minimal sentences. In the first in-depth scrutiny of the ways and means of this disaster, this groundbreaking book comes to disturbing conclusions about the deliberate nature of this financial fraud, the political collusion involved, and the leniency of the criminal justice system in dealing with these "Gucci-clad white-collar criminals." Using material from over one hundred interviews with government officials and industry leaders and recently declassified documents, the authors show how―contrary to previous government and "expert" explanations that chalked the disaster up to business risks gone awry or adverse economic conditions―S&amp;L leaders engaged in deliberate fraud, stealing from their own corporations to speculate on high-risk ventures. Tempted by the insurance net, perpetrators looted their own institutions in a new kind of white-collar crime the authors dub "collective embezzlement." Big Money Crime also demonstrates how systematic political collusion―not just policy errors―was a critical ingredient in this unprecedented series of frauds. Bringing together statistics from a variety of government agencies, the authors provide a close reading of the track record of prosecutions and sentencing and find that "suite crime" receives much more lenient treatment than "street crime," despite its significantly higher price tag. The book concludes with a number of modest, but no less urgent, policy recommendations to counter the current deregulatory trend and to avert a replay of the S&amp;L debacle in other financial sectors. FROM THE BOOK:"We built thick walls; we have cameras; we have time clocks on the vaults . . . all these controls were to protect against somebody stealing the cash. Well, you can steal far more money, and take it out the back door. The best way to rob a bank is to own one."―House Committee on Government Operations, 1988

Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic

Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners’ written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies. Appealing to Justice is both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely asymmetrical setting and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. Quoting extensively from their interviews with prisoners and officials, the authors give voice to those who are almost never heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms within the sociological literature―for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable and/or stigmatized populations to name injuries and file claims, and about the relentlessly adversarial subjectivities of prisoners and correctional officials―and they do so with striking poignancy. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

Politics & Social Sciences

Jenness, Valerie

Social Sciences

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Calavita, Kitty. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Calavita, Kitty

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Calavita, Kitty. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Invitation to Law and Society, Second Edition: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Invitation to Law and Society, Second Edition: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (After the Law)

Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (After the Law)

Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis

Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis

Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic