ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 2 (February 2002) pp. 67-69.

BETWEEN LAW AND CULTURE: RELOCATING LEGAL STUDIES by David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno, and Lisa C. Bower (Editors). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 337 pp. Cloth $74.95. ISBN: 0-8166-3380-0. Paper $29.95. ISBN: 0-8166-3381-9.

Reviewed by Julie Novkov, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon.

BETWEEN LAW AND CULTURE: RELOCATING LEGAL STUDIES expressly positions itself as confronting both the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary epistemological standpoints and postmodernism. Thus, the audiences and agendas for the book are multiple, overlapping, and conflicted.
The volume, edited by David Theo Goldberg (African American studies), Michael Musheno (justice studies), and Lisa Bower (independent scholar), includes
contributions mostly from prominent scholars and rising stars more closely associated with the Law and Society Association than with their disciplinary organizations. The collection of essays arose from an interdisciplinary graduate seminar entitled "Justice and Identities" and facilitated by the editors. The editors frame the collection in the most basic terms as "mapping the relationship between contemporary sociolegal studies and cultural studies" (p. ix), and on this level, the collection is coherent and provocative.

The timing of the publication of these collected essays is serendipitous. If we date the birth of modern sociolegal scholarship with the foundation of the Law and Society Association in 1964, sociolegal studies is ripe for a midlife crisis, with all of the challenges and opportunities that such a crisis implies. The editors identify the crisis as a tension between romantic longing for unifying narratives and theories on the one hand and terror of the embrace of instability and contingency. Put generally, the essays all interrogate the troubled relationship among postmodern and poststructural epistemologies, cultural studies, and the law as a site for
research. The volume can be used as a research overview of the interface between cultural studies and legal studies or as the basis for a graduate-level course on contemporary law and society. The selected essays reflect a productive tension over the interface between high-level theoretical inquiries and the kind of grounded empirical work that has characterized sociolegal research since its modern inception. Sociolegal scholars have produced a significant body of knowledge and theory over the past several years through examining identities and power in postmodern frameworks, and the essays in BETWEEN LAW AND CULTURE collectively enable us to step back and assess critically the significance of the cultural turn in sociolegal studies.

The editors have grouped the fifteen essays into four categories: culture, spaces, identities, and sexualities. The groupings are somewhat arbitrary, since all of the essays implicate at least culture and identity and many also incorporate space, sexuality, and race. Nonetheless, the organization

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provides a framework through which the reader can understand what is at stake in the incorporation of cultural studies in the selected areas of inquiry. In the section on culture, authors David Engel, Rosemary Coombe, Marjorie Garber, and Herman Gray operationalize culture as constitutive of and constituted by the legal field. Four chapters on spaces by David Harvey, Lisa Sanchez, Rona Tamiko Halualani, and David Theo Goldberg conceptualize the state both as a construction imbued with culture and as a physical (and somatic) presence immersed in power relations. Chapters on identities by Yuen Huo and Tom Tyler, Trish Oberweis and Michael Musheno, S. Lily Mendoza, and Deborah Henderson work through the theoretical implications of identity as a problematic category with respect to critiques of essentialism. The volume concludes with three chapters on sexuality by Carl Stychin, Christine Yalda, and Paul Passavant, all of which work through the relationship between the state and marginalized sexual identities.

The essays do not, however, present a seamless narrative. Rather, they are in conscious conflict with each other-the centrality of law, the permeability of the state, the plasticity of identity, individuals' capacities for resistance, and the relevance of both deconstructive assaults on categories and wistful liberal hopes for reconciliation and empowerment are all up for grabs. For the reader whose disciplinary home is political science, questions about the relationship between identity and law and about the state's relationship to culture are likely to be the most salient. BETWEEN LAW AND CULTURE has some helpful insights into these questions and presents a good representation of interdisciplinary (or perhaps as the editors would have it, transdisciplinary) perspectives on them.

From a political perspective, how does law function to shape identities through its relationship to culture? Also, how do identities embedded in culture in turn affect the law? Answers range broadly. Among the most hopeful is Stychin's reading of the South African constitution's commitment to protect lesbians and gays from discrimination as a creative reinterpretation of tradition and liberal commitments to heterogeneity and pluralism. Oberweis and Musheno consider the simultaneously repressive and liberative potentials in cops' identities, showing how women, lesbians, and people of color can negotiate their positionings with respect to their own
identities and their roles in the communities they serve. Goldberg's essay on injury and identity presents identity as embedded in communities localized in space and time but as fundamentally conditioned by the law. The more pessimistic interpretations include Sanchez's work on prostitution, which presents a picture of prostitutes' identity as coercively constructed by the disciplinary practices of community policing. Halualani describes Hawai'ian identity as tragically constrained by the state's historical efforts to suppress it in conjunction with modern liberal attempts to atone through benefits awarded by blood quantum.

What of the state? It mediates cultural impulses and translates these impulses into disciplinary power, as essays by Coombe, Garber, Halualani, Goldberg, and Yalda emphasize. It also exists as a locus for cultural fights and can even provide a site for cultural transformations orchestrated by subaltern populations, themes in the work of Mendoza, Stychin, Harvey, and Gray. The state is not, however, a thickly conceived and described institution in any of the essays, even those that explicitly describe the courts' production of doctrine. Rather, it appears as

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a complex field for interaction, negotiation, and coercion.

The postmodern and poststructuralist bent of cultural studies comes through clearly in most of the essays, but many of the essays as well as the introduction acknowledge the difficulty of integrating these epistemological commitments with the desire to honor the deeply empirical tradition of research in law and society. These scholars are savvy enough to recognize that an uncritical embrace of Foucauldian beliefs about power as a microphysical phenomenon sits uncomfortably with the selection of the law-a central and overtly power-laden locus that has access to the most concrete forms of violence-as a site for research. In some cases, however, this tension pushes the essays further from the interface between law and politics and leaves students of politics without adequate bridges back.

The most poignant tension, though, is the question of the liberative political power of the law. Liberal legalism has taken the law's capacity to transform the state and society for the better as an article of faith. The turn to critical theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism left such beliefs in tatters, framing them at best as supremely na<ve and at worst as cynical distractions from hegemonic and coercive power relations. Rational or not, however, the longing for liberation has persisted and is manifest in Harvey's and Stychin's essays. (Both Harvey and Stychin recognize this tension; Harvey consciously plays on utopianism as a central theme.) The
harshest response is perhaps Halualani's; her work on the history of blood quantum in Hawai'i presents a case in which liberal legalism cannot craft an adequate scheme for reparation, having destroyed indigenous kin networks and histories in ways that cannot accommodate reconstruction. Even Halualani, however, leaves room for the active articulation of subaltern identity through resistance and challenge, though she holds out no hope for the recreation of a lost world of Hawai'ian indigenous identity.

The volume could have benefited from short integrative essays introducing each section in more analytical depth - the editors' vision for the entire book is clear and coherent, but the connections among the chapters in the four sections could be presented more explicitly. The introductory essay, however, is helpful in that it goes beyond just describing each chapter and its relation to the themes of the volume. The editors contextualize both the volume and the significance of cultural studies in
sociolegal research nicely. For political scientists who are less familiar with work in law and society, the introduction is a good place to start.

Overall, BETWEEN LAW AND CULTURE is a lively, engaging, and thoughtful contribution to sociolegal scholarship. It presents a range of provocative research by scholars who are not afraid to confront the tension between the search for clean theoretical frameworks and the messiness of everyday existence under the law.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Julie Novkov.