Law, the State and the dialectics of State crime

Abstract

Two notable features of Chambliss and Seidman’s pioneering work Law, Order and Power (1971/1982) were its engagement with the literatures of jurisprudence and legal anthropology and its development, in the second edition, of a ‘dialectical’ account of law. The view of law they advocated was state-centred, with an explicit debt to legal positivism and American legal realism. Law, in societies with centralized states, was a body of norms distinguished from other norms by being state-made and state-enforced. The making and enforcement of law was a product of social conflict, which in the second edition – “not so much a revision as a new book” (Chambliss and Seidman 1982: ix) – was analysed on Marxist lines as a reflection of fundamental structural contradictions.