Center for the Study of Law and Society

The Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS) is a research unit at the University of California, Berkeley. It is designed to foster interdisciplinary empirical research and analysis concerning the behavior of legal institutions, legal processes, and legal actors the relationship of legal and social change and the social origins and consequences of law. Founded in 1961, under the leadership of sociologist Philip Selznick, the center was instrumental in establishing sociolegal studies as a distinct, university-based academic discipline.

The Center's affiliated scholars in the 1960s, Philip Selznick, Sheldon Messinger, Jerome Skolnick, Jerome Carlin, and Caleb Foote, among others, were some of the “founding fathers” of the post–World War II “law and society” movement. CSLS-based scholarship focused on the interplay of legal values and social pressures in a wide variety of settings, including business corporations, police departments, lower criminal courts, prisons and jails, workers' compensation tribunals, law firms, juvenile gangs, and poor communities.

By hosting visiting legal scholars and social scientists from other universities in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, CSLS also encouraged the development of empirically based, normatively sensitive sociolegal scholarship elsewhere. It served as a model for sociolegal research institutes and programs at other universities, including Oxford University, the University of Wisconsin, and SUNY–Buffalo, to name just a few. In the late 1970s, CSLS scholars initiated Berkeley's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP), the first and leading interdisciplinary PhD program in sociolegal studies, as well as the Legal Studies Program, the only undergraduate teaching program in sociolegal studies in the United States staffed and managed by a school of law.

The roster of CSLS also accommodated JSP graduate students and a growing number of JSP faculty. These included historians Harry Scheiber and David Lieberman; political scientists Martin Shapiro, Malcolm Feeley, and Robert Kagan; sociologists Kristin Luker and Lauren Edelman; economists Daniel Rubinfeld and Robert Cooter; philosophers Jeremy Waldron, Samuel Scheffler, and Christopher Kutz; interdisciplinary scholars Jonathan Simon and Catherine Albiston; and social psychologists Tom Tyler and Robert MacCoun. Selznick was succeeded as chair (later director) of CSLS by Skolnick, Feeley, Kagan, and Edelman.

CSLS maintains a lively agenda of weekly bag lunch seminars, conferences, and extramurally funded research projects and supports the generation of a continually growing body of influential sociolegal scholarship. In connection with an award ceremony for Philip Selznick in 1996, Lawrence Friedman of Stanford Law School wrote:

Many of the Center's projects have resulted in books, of which a representative few include Eugene Bardach and Robert A. Kagan. (1982). Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Robert D. Cooter. (2000). The Strategic Constitution. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward Rubin. (1998). Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons. New York: Cambridge University Press; Neil Gunningham, Robert A. Kagan, and Dorothy Thornton. (2003). Shades of Green: Business, Regulation and Environment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Robert A. Kagan. (2001). Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Robert A. Kagan, Martin Krygier, and Kenneth Winston, eds. (2002). Legality and Community: On the Intellectual Legacy of Philip Selznick. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; David Lieberman. (1989). The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter. (2001). Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Sheldon L. Messinger. (1970). Strategies of Control. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.; Philippe Nonet and Philip Selznick. (2001). Law and Society in Transition: Toward Responsive Law, 2d ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers (orig. 1978); Harry N. Scheiber and Malcolm M. Feeley, eds. (1989). Power Divided: Studies in Federalism. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies; Philip Selznick, Philippe Nonet, and Harold Vollmer. (1969). Law, Society and Industrial Justice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Philip Selznick. (1992). The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press; Martin Shapiro. (1981). Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and (1988). Who Guards the Guardians? Judicial Control of Administration. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press; Jonathan Simon. (1993). Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1980–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Jerome H. Skolnick. (1994). Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, 3d ed. New York: Macmillan (orig. 1966).

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