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.
Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor in the Departments of Criminology, Law and Society, and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of several volumes, most recently including Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe.