Book Reviews : MICHAEL KING AND CHRISTINE PIPER, How the Law Thinks About Children. Aldershot: Gower, 1990, viii + 172 pp., £29.50 hardback
| Author | Bill Hebenton |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/096466399300200109 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
115
I appreciate the book, although in part for other reasons than the authors intended, I
believe. First of all, the theme it deals with is an important one, from various points of
view. Second, the authors bring together an amount of information on both bureaucracies
(including courts) and on litigation that forms, together with the analysis, a valuable
contribution. And third, a thorough reading of the book suggests a number of interesting
further questions, both for those concerned with litigation and those interested in law
enforcement, or implementation, through bureaucratic agencies. Recommended.
’
REFERENCES
Aubert, Vilhelm (1966) ’Some Social Functions of Legislation’, Acta Sociologica 10.
Black, Donald (1973) ’The Mobilization of Law’, Journal of Legal Studies 2.
Felstiner, William L. F., Richard L. Abel and Austin Sarat (1981) ’The Emergence and
Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming ...’, Law
&
Society
Review 15.
Galanter, Marc (1974) ’Why the "Haves" Come out Ahead; Speculations on the Limits of
Legal Change’, Law
&
Soaety Review 9.
Lipsky, Michael (1980) Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public
Services. New
York: Russel Sage.
Lempert, Richard D. (1978) ’More Tales of Two Courts: Exploring Changes in the
"Dispute Settlement Function" of Trial Courts’, Law
&
Society Review 13.
HELEEN F. P. IETSWAART
Faculty of Law, Erasmus University,
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
MICHAEL KING
AND
CHRISTINE PIPER, How
the Law Thinks About Children. Aldershot:
Gower, 1990, viii + 172 pp., £29.50 hardback.
Although only a text of some 150 pages, this book is substantial in ideas and important for
at least three reasons. First, it brings to the attention of a wider audience recent writing in
radical legal epistemology which seeks to transcend the now sterile justice/welfare debate.
Second, it is timely, in that the subject matter of the book directly addresses the ’working
together’ logic of recent child related legislation in England and Wales. Third, the authors
develop their own concept of ’child responsive’ law and offer through it insights for legal
decision-making concerning children’s welfare.
King and Piper’s goal is ’to examine recent perspectives on the law as a social institution
capable of &dquo;thinking&dquo;, that is of generating knowledge about children, what they are, who
should look after them and, above all, what is good or bad for them’ (p. 1). The intention is
to see whether this unfamiliar approach can throw light on current concerns over
children’s issues in court and also what happens when ’law’s thoughts’ conflict with those
of other social organizations.
Following Chapter 1, where the limitations of welfare/justice as competing ideologies
are succinctly presented within the context of child protection, juvenile justice and child
custody in matrimonial cases, the authors conclude that...
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