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Common Knowledge and Ideological Critique: The Significance of Knowing That the “Haves” Come Out Ahead

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patricia Ewick  and
Susan S. Silbey
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Extract

In 1974, Marc Galanter published a paper entitled “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change” in which he analyzed the limits of a legal system, such as that of the United States, to achieve redistributive outcomes. He traced the limits to features of the U.S. legal system's “basic architecture.” The specific features to which he referred were a series of structural dualisms or institutional contradictions that permitted symbolic claims to universalism, public authority, and equality to coexist with particularism, private power, and inequality.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 4: Do the “Haves” Still Come Out Ahead? , 1999 , pp. 1025 - 1041
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

This paper was presented to the conference “Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead?” held at the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1-2 May 1998. Adapted from Ewick and Silbey (1998), The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

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