Law and the Search for Community

Now in its 2010 paperback edition with a new Foreword, this enduring analysis of law and organizations that change the community--the core relationship between citizen and state--takes aim at real problems in the modern system. A recognized socio-legal classic, first published by Penn Press in 1990, studies the problem of law and community targeted at specific problems that still resonate: health care, medical consent, pollution, special education, and care for the elderly and poor. Handler considers not only theories of justice and process, but also their real applications to people caught in the machinery of government dependency and mystification. From the Foreword by Professor Frank Munger, this book "grapples with one of the twentieth century's enduring legacies--our continuing reliance upon the welfare state to solve problems of collective existence and increasing recognition of the limits of bureaucratic administration. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programs for the poor, disabled, single parents, young, elderly and others on society's margins, the policy domain in which Joel Handler has had a major voice for much of his career. Handler is at heart a civil rights advocate, and his long exploration of the welfare state's promise, and its failures, grows from concerns about those who are critically dependent upon its entitlements. As citizens of the twenty-first century, sadder but wiser after sub-prime mortgage and hedge-fund crises, more of us are becoming members of this group.... His explorations always include, as in this book, both broad intellectual inquiry and creative syntheses leading toward new ideas and opportunities [and] he always provides us with a reason to continue to believe in humanitarian reform." Part of the "Classics of Law and Society," a series of the essential canon of broader law study, with bibliography and index.