Studies in Law, Politics and Society: Volume 50

Although rabbinic literature is often divided into the “legal” and the “homiletical,” material classified under the latter category includes many important reflections on law and on legal action. This chapter centers on an extended passage in the homiletical work Leviticus Rabba. I argue that the passage conveys an implicit awareness of the dynamics of legal fiction and legal agency in the face of an unjust law.

The chapter contends that although Israeli reality is replete with legal issues, very few films deal directly with the law or with a legal process as a central theme. Contemporary Israeli films are not very different from the early Israeli films in their embracement of a national heroic narrative, which typically leaves very little space for legal issues. The chapter demonstrates the absence of law from Israeli cinema by looking closely at war films, which are probably the most popular and influential Israeli films. War films reflect and in the same time participate in the construction of the Israeli collective consciousness, wherein the army experience is central. Tracing the way in which law is presented (or lacks representation) in them may shed light from a new angle on the role of law in shaping social and political norms in Israel.

Potentially major shifts in privacy norms are taking place as a result of advances in genetic technologies. This chapter identifies a spillover effect in the form of the inadvertent emergence of new norms and introduces an original typology developed in response to these new norms regarding privacy. It focuses on the emerging practice of compelling access to genetic information of biologically related persons to gain information about a particular individual. This chapter highlights the recent practice in child lead paint poisoning cases in which defendants seek to discover medical and I.Q. records of biologically related non-parties to establish alternate genetic causation of low I.Q. It concludes that greater attention should be given to the spillover effect and the emergence of shadow norms.

In this chapter, I trace Arizona's prison siting and construction history to examine how cultural norms and traditions, economics, political prerogatives, and notions about the prison's purpose shape how such institutions are conceived, planned, and realized over time. By looking longitudinally at how prisons have come to be – as physical entities – in one locale, I reveal both the continuities and changes in the underlying meaning of the prison. In doing so, I aim to contribute to a broader understanding of the process of late modern penal change, especially the proliferation of prison building in the past 30 years.

This chapter presents an attempt to understand why mediation has gained so much popularity in the western world in the past three decades. I demonstrate how mediation, of all the processes that have sprung under the umbrella of the ADR movement, responds to some basic human needs and offers a way to thoroughly deal with authoritarian tendencies and patterns common, too common, in modern everyday life. A wider understanding of these needs can help emphasize the added values of the mediation process as a profound alternative to the legal proceedings as a mechanism for transforming disputes.

Taking both an event-centered and a process approach to cause lawyering, the chapter asks: (1) if, when, and how working with movements can lead to one being functionally seen as a cause lawyer and (2) whether researchers should include “hired gun” and state attorneys in the cause lawyering conversation. These questions are addressed by seeing how various cause lawyer qualities are exhibited by a range of attorneys involved in anti-abortion protest regulation cases. The research suggests that reasons exist to view previously excluded attorneys through the cause lawyering lens, and to continue pursuing the cause lawyer qualities discussed here.