My subject is postmodern politics and law, protest from below, and the “new” social movements. The question I am concerned with is the value of postmodernism for transformative politics.

Scholars concerned with the struggles of subordinate groups have long emphasized protest from below. Accounts of the resistance of blacks and poor people became prominent in the 1960s. This tradition, joined by feminists, gays and lesbians, as well as others, continued in the 1980s. The new social movements are, roughly, environmental, antinuclear, peace, feminist, and gay and lesbian. Whether these broad movements are "new" or variations of older movements is much debated. For our purposes, they are included here insofar as they are antimaterialist, antistatist, antibureaucratic; they seek to cross traditional class lines in favor of humanistic, interpersonal, and communitarian values.

It has become obligatory for leaders of professional associations to exhort colleagues to practice their craft in a socially responsible manner. But Joel Handler has issued a more controversial challenge in his 1992 presidential address to the Law and Society Association. He marries the idea of responsible legal scholarship to a recovery of faith in structuralist political analysis and transformative political vision.

Many in the association no doubt will find this proposed marriage undesirable for a variety of intellectual and political reasons" By contrast, I join those many who have found Handler's bold jeremiad provocative and important. Moreover, I share some of his particular concerns about the limitations of much contemporary legal study and political movement activity. At the same time, however, my research on legal mobilization by social movements has led me to draw differently the conceptual lines of both connection and division among the various trends that he identifies. The following comments aim to outline briefly some alternative, although often complementary, readings of these trends and their implications for scholarship. The discussion evolves from my most critical to my most supportive points.

In his presidential address to the Law and Society Association, Joel Handler describes recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. In his description, Handler depicts a world in which all that was once collective and effectual is now fragmented and futile. Not that long ago, he suggests, we had real (ideological/class-based) social movements and vital communities that were documented by scholars in optimistic stories of resistance and protest. But time passed and we became postmodernized: destabilized and uncertain, ironic and listless. Where once we challenged oppression and power en masse to the flourish of trumpets, now we are just so many flatulent individuals.

Joel Handler's presidential address to the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association examines the intellectual debates that animate recent studies of social change. This talk is his attempt to understand and question these studies of transformative politics which, Handler claims, are deeply influenced by a turn toward postmodernism. After ruminating over the postmodernist argument and its broader intellectual currents as well as its impact on studies of what he calls “protest from below” (e.g., Ewick & Silbey 1992; White 1990), he compares this work to earlier, more structurally informed approaches (e.g., Genovese 1974; Stack 1974; Piven & Cloward 1977). Handler believes that this earlier work remains more persuasive. Because the work of the 1970s is firmly rooted in an analysis of politics and economy that forms the basis for a theory of progressive social change, he concludes that it is more compelling, provocative, and socially meaningful. Handler is skeptical about the current research that is influenced by strains of postmodernism, although he does not seem to advocate a wholesale return to the earlier, social-structural approach. Thus, he does not take the difficult step of outlining a more useful and progressive analytical and political strategy.

Joel Handler would have had big problems with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, It is an auteurial tour-de-force by way of a postmodern fable for the ages that is self-consciously perplexing and inconclusive. While focusing on the competing imperatives of the pacificism of Martin Luther King's assimilationist politics and the violence of Malcolm X's cultural nationalism, Lee poses the more general and debilitating dilemma that faces those committed to decisive action in an opaque world. In a pivotal scene, the flip and up-and-coming Mookie is harangued by a local and elderly busybody. In hushed and conspiratorial tones, he advises Mookie to “Always do the right thing.” The exasperated Mookie complains, “That's it? Do the right thing? O.K., I got it. I'm gone …” As the film advances to its climactic and chaotic denouement, Mookie is forced to confront the excruciating accuracy and infuriating elusiveness of this absolutely trite piece of sage advice. Determined to “do the right thing,” he acts in a way that both he and almost everyone else will forever question and second-guess. In this appropriately cryptic manner, Lee suggests the fecundity and fragility of political action in a postmodern world.

Usually, one thinks of nostalgia as the characteristic vice of the conservative. When Republicans bandy slogans like “family values,” progressives are quick to recognize the dangerous sentimentality that yearns for a status quo ante in which men were men and women were women and minorities were seldom seen and never heard—the age, as Ronald Reagan so callously put it, “back before we knew we had a race problem.” In contrast, one thinks of Utopian romanticism as the characteristic weakness of the progressive. The radical's longing for revolutionary change is seen by conservatives as the dangerously naive and quixotic yearning for human perfection in a flawed and tragic world.

Joel Handler is a friend, and I have appreciated his work for almost 30 years. I had dinner with him two nights before he gave his presidential address in Philadelphia. He knew that he was taking a chance by doing something different, and he hoped that he could bring it off. He did. Even if those he challenged raise valid objections to his position—and I'm not the one to judge this—he raised important questions and started us toward important answers.

A presidential address at a professional association is an odd art form. Beginners and those completely outside of the group's tradition don't get to be president. Nonetheless, if all you do is celebrate the mainstream, you put the audience to sleep. You must give the speech during a lunch. You compete with dessert and waiters removing plates. You talk after awards and other ceremonies have taken more time than planned. Entertainment may be more appropriate than challenging thought." Despite all these hazards, Joel Handler flattered his audience by demanding our attention and offering ideas clearly worth it.

This structural analysis of the relationships among participants in a criminal justice system, viewed in its political context, pursues John Hagan's suggestion that criminal justice theory adopt a “structural-contextual approach.” Drawing on data from a survey of 211 criminal justice administrators, interest group leaders, and news reporters in Cook County, Illinois, we examine networks of contact among the various governmental elites and private groups, using smallest space analyses to depict the patterns of relationships. Although the literature suggests that the police and the judiciary are often closely entwined with local political elites, we conclude that the judiciary is a relatively distinct or autonomous set in the Chicago context. The police, however, are found near the political elites. The news media are strongly oriented toward enforcement agencies rather than toward the judiciary or corrections, and the public and private organizations representing less powerful constituencies, such as minorities, juveniles, and the mentally ill, are found on the periphery. Contrary to some suggestions in the literature, government officials are not found in the center of these networks. Rather, the core of the structure is hollow, indicating an absence of central brokers or mediators.

Law's saliency in the development of West Indian societies began in the earliest days of settlement and has remained critical and constitutive. The author examines the transformation of Caribbean law over time as an instrument of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.