ABSTRACT
The past twenty years have seen a strong revival of interest in legal institutions—how they work, the forces that impinge upon them, their limits and potentialities. This revival was, in the first instance, largely limited to the world of scholarship. During the 1950s there was an upsurge of hope that a new social science would redeem the promise of an older generation to explore reasons and remedies for the apparent isolation of the legal order. 1 There had long been a sense that lawmaking, judging, policing, and regulation were all too easily divorced from the realities of social experience and from the ideal of justice itself. The new program reflected both an academic impulse—the extension of social science perspectives and methods of study to the analysis of legal institutions—and 2a reformist spirit. It was hoped that the time had come when sustained inquiry could yield beneficial results for the administration of justice.
