Sociology of Law
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in all felony trials the accused must be provided with legal counsel. The case of Gideon v. Wainwright (372 U.S. 355, 1963) was widely celebrated as a David and Goliath story of the triumph of the rule of law: An indigent defendant's handwritten petition had persuaded all nine justices of the Supreme Court to provide a nationwide right to counsel (Lewis 1964). Shortly after Gideon's victory, Blumberg (1967) published an empirical case study describing the actual work of criminal defense attorneys. That study suggested that Gideon's case had little relevance to the 90 percent of felony convictions that the prosecution wins not in a courtroom trial but through informal plea bargaining. Moreover, the attorneys to whom the poor were now constitutionally entitled, Blumberg contended, had over the years mutated from trial advocates into bureaucratic cogs whose primary function was to assist the state in processing legal files efficiently.
Blumberg's deconstruction of the legal myth of the centrality of criminal trials and adversarial counsel exemplifies two central features of the sociology of law. First, that field challenges legal formalism, the philosophy that the law stands above social life, develops according to its own internal logic, and autonomously constrains or facilitates social interaction.
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