Susan Sterett

Judicial Review in Britain

Britain does not have a written constitution, which provides for a common assessment that it has no constitutional law. However, it actually instead provides a limiting case for considering the influence of courts and law in governance. For the courts have been involved in modifying both central and local government programs through statutory interpretation. The modifications that the courts have brought about have meant that the government has to take legal rules and courts into account in designing programs. The current limits on what the courts do have been part of the provocation for a movement in favor of a bill of rights in Britain.

Legality in Administration in Britain and the United States Toward an Institutional Explanation

Efforts to structure administrative processes through legality are well known in the United States. However, they are seldom analyzed in a comparative context, with an effort to explain how legal procedures are structured into administrative process. Political disputes criticizing bureaucracy and arguing for more legal accountability have occurred in Britain as well as the United States, culminating in statutes. But the extensive postwar debate in Britain led to a statute that did not accomplish as much as the American Administrative Procedure Act. This article explains the efforts and the somewhat different outcomes in Britain and the United States with an analysis of the coherence of and divisions within legal ideology and how the legal profession interacted with the different configuration of state institutions in Britain and the United States.

A Brief Note from the New Editors

Welcome to Volume 51, Issue 1-the first issue edited by our binational, cross-disciplinary team. We would like to begin this issue by thanking the outgoing editors, by introducing ourselves, and by offering a brief overview of important editorial principles for our team.The journal comes to us after excellent editing work by Tim Johnson and Joachim Savelsberg. Tim and Joachim continue to share great advice for the transition, and have prepared us well to deal with the many issues that arise day-to-day in the job of editing a journal. Tim and Joachims three-year tenure at Law & Society Review saw the publication of many wonderful articles and issues, including the 50th anniversary issue celebrating LSRs golden anniversary. The LSRs continuing high impact factor is compelling evidence of Tim and Joachims careful stewardship. Although any new editorship team necessarily involves transition, we will continue many long-standing practices. We continue to look for top quality, innovative scholarship to publish, and to provide effective and full reviewer response to the manuscripts submitted to us. But our new team brings a unique sense of energy and perspective stemming from the teams structure. We are the first team that is a triad-three scholars at three separate institutions (Indiana University, Virginia Tech, University of British Colombia), two located in different areas of the United States, and one in Canada. We represent different perspectives and history in the field and in our profession. Two of us are political scientists, two of us teach in law schools as interdisciplinary legal scholars, one of us teaches in a public policy school. We hope that these three different sites of editorial leadership allow us to contribute to the work our predecessors have done broadening LSRs reach.As scholars, one of our common points is an interest in how individuals respond to the construction by law of subject positions. Canadian legal scholars have been particularly engaged in exploring indigenous legal questions and Margot Young brings a commitment to that expansion of law and society coverage, along with feminist and social justice expertise. Jeannine Bell has long worked on the intersecting issues of law, crime, and racial injustice with scholarship that is focused on hate crime, hate speech, and policing, and how these concerns affect the lives of racial minorities in the United States. Susan Sterett has worked on multilevel analyses of crafting social welfare and other membership claims by race and gender, working both from appellate courts cases and from interview data to analyze those who organize claims and those who make individual claims. In our work we use a range of approaches to data collection, ranging from ethnography to analysis of survey data.Even though our work touches on many different areas in socio-legal research, we recognize the need for assistance from specialists in areas with which we are less familiar. We have assembled a team of associate editors and advisory board members who capture a broad array of socio-legal scholarship across the globe. Our advisory board includes sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and legal scholars, who teach in variety of departments in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their names and institutional affiliations are listed in the front pages. …

Constitutionalism and Social Spending: Pennsylvania's Old Age Pensions in the 1920s

Rather than studying only what appellate courts do, scholars of law and society have been pointing out that the interpretation of law is an enterprise many engage in—e.g., lawyers, administrative officials, and the lay public, as well as courts. Recent scholarship has broadened the analysis of constitutional law in a way that is not Supreme Court centered. Scholars have focused on constitutionalism as the idea that words written down limit and shape political practice. For example, Michael Kammens work shows the continuing and repetitive celebrations of the Constitution in American life, celebrations that have taken the federal constitution as “a machine that would go of itself” and as a sacred text, often forgetting how much it has been remade through reinterpretation. This focus on constitutionalism rather than on appellate court decisions leads to a broader understanding of constitutions in a polity, so that scholars analyze rights claims in addition to examining the rights that courts have said people have. This effort emphasizes the meaningful elements of law, since the definition of constitutionalism focuses on what people think they should do, or on what they have a right to do. It leads to scholarship that points out the penetration of legal language, particularly claims of rights, into American culture. With this approach, one reason to analyze elite statements of law is that they state rights in ways that become part of general political consciousness.