"A
systematic review of the first five volumes of the Law and Society Review
reveals the following. Five articles take decisions of the Warren Court as normative
standards and seek to advance the values they appear to enshrine by some form
of ‘gap study’; e.g., Blumberg, "The Practice of Law as Confidence Game:
Organizational Cooptation of a Profession," 1 Law & Soc’y Rev. 15
(1967). Six articles deal explicitly with Great Society Programs, deploying ‘scientific’
knowledge in ways that are clearly designed to foster or improve activities such
as legal services to the poor, welfare, urban renewal; e.g., Hannon, "The
Leadership Problem in the Legal Services Program," 4 Law & Soc’y Rev.
235 (1969). A third set of studies in these first five volumes deals with other
projects on the liberal agenda of the time, such as reforming the insanity defense
and child custody adjudication; e.g., Arens, "The Durham Rule in Action:
Judicial Psychiatry and Psychiatric Justice," 1 Law & Soc’y Rev.
41 (1967); Ellsworth & Levy, "Legislative Reform of Child Custody Adjudication:
An Effort to Rely on Social Science Data in Formulating Legal Policies,"
4 Law & Soc’y Rev. 167 (1969). The remaining articles in these early
volumes can be grouped into three basic categories: (1) methodological essays
designed to disseminate standard sociological methods to law and society scholars,
thus ensuring the scientificity of the work the movement aspired to produce; e.g.,
Lempet, "Strategies of Research Design in the Legal Impact Study: The Control
of Plausible Rival Hypotheses," 1 Law & Soc’y Rev. 111 (1966);
(2) programmatic essays which seek to establish law and society as a field by
discussing the questions it should address, the concepts it should use, and the
objects it should study; e.g., Handler, "Field Research Strategies in Urban
Legal Studies," 5 Law & Soc’y Rev. 345 (1971); and (3) anthropological
studies which use cross-cultural research to support the idea of universal laws
and regularities governing the relationship of ‘legal’ institutions and society;
e.g., Count-Van Manen, "A Deviant Case of Deviance: Singapore," 5 Law
& Soc’y Rev. 389 (1971); Massell, "Law as an Instrument of Revolutionary
Change in a Traditional Milieu: The Case of Soviet Central Asia," 2 Law
& Soc’y Rev. 179 (1968)." [David M. Trubek, "The
Short, Happy Life of the Law and Society Movement," 18 Fla. St. U.L. Rev.
4, 39n76 (1990)]