Introduction
| Author | Philip Selznick |
| Published date | 01 March 1994 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399400300102 |
| Date | 01 March 1994 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
INTRODUCTION
PHILIP SELZNICK
University of California, Berkeley, USA
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1
,
,
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JURISPRUDENCE and Social Policy (Jsp) Program at the School of
t
Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, began operation in
1978, when the first graduate class was enrolled. Its intellectual origins
include all the efforts, over many years, to open up the boundaries of legal
thought and education; to treat the study of law as a nonprofessional academic
discipline; to bring to bear all relevant fields of learning, including philosophy,
history, sociology, economics, psychology and political science. Many of these
efforts foundered on the shoals of narrow professionalism, especially in the
United States, where the study of law became largely restricted to professional
schools whose main mission was training and socializing prospective lawyers.
Nevertheless, the hope for a more comprehensive perspective never died. It
was rekindled in the 1950s by the Ford Foundation, which supported a
substantial program of socio-legal research at the University of Chicago Law
School; and by the interest of the Russell Sage Foundation, which gave important
seed money for ’law and society’ research at several universities, including
Wisconsin, Yale and Berkeley. In 1961, with help from Russell Sage, we founded
Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. The work of the Center
helped lay a foundation for the creation of JSP.
In the early 1970s, the Berkeley campus moved to abolish the School of
Criminology - on condition, however, that scholarly work on criminal justice be
continued. I chaired a committee charged with proposing an alternative program,
and the report of the committee became a charter for jsP. Here is a key paragraph
from the report:
It has long been recognized that American scholarship has not met the challenge of
studying law as a basic social institution. To some extent this failure has reflected
the preoccupation of the law schools with professional training, which has resulted
SOCIAL &
LEGAL STUDIES (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 3
7-
(1994), 7-13
8
in a tendency to slight philosophical criticism, social science perspectives, and
systematic research on fundamental issues of legal and social policy. In short,
junsprudence, broadly conceived, has been a weak and unintegrated aspect of legal
teaching and scholarship in the United States. Although other disciplines ... have
participated in legal studies, these efforts have suffered from the lack of a
comprehensive approach, and, in many cases, from insufficient appreciation of
legal doctrine and experience. From the lawyers’ point of view, the other disciplines
are instructive in their desire to formulate comprehensive models and perspectives,
yet often naive in their unwillingness to take account of the complexities of
rule-making and decision; the lawyers, on the other hand, are perceived as
admirably rigorous but unduly narrow and insufficiently theoretical.
The committee recommended creation of a broad program of teaching and
research, to include undergraduate as well as graduate studies. The resources
hitherto granted the School of Criminology would be transferred to the School
of Law. This was a crucial decision, recognizing the importance of the law school
as an institutional base. The
PhD in jsP was to be granted by the School of Law.
The graduate students would be members of the law school student body; and
the faculty, regardless of discipline would be regular members of the law faculty.
The undergraduate program (later called Legal Studies) would be the responsi-
bility of the jsP faculty, and therefore of the law school. It would, however, be a
program (later a major) in the College of Letters and Science. The undergraduates
are students in the College, not in the School of Law.
Our
idea was to help create a revitalized jurisprudence, embracing every aspect
of law-related study, and with a strong commitment to policy research.’ ’A
concern for policy’, said the founding document, ’can bring focus to social
science research, historical investigation, and philosophical analysis. These in
turn can insure that policy studies will be truly basic and critical, not confined by
existing assumptions and perspectives.’ Hence the title, ’Jurisprudence and Social
Policy’.
The new program was founded on two related...
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