Politics and the attack on FDR's economists: from the grand alliance to the Cold War

US government economists in the later years of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt were urged to treat the Soviet Union as an ally, in the interests of winning World War II and establishing the basis for peaceful cooperation after the war. The onset of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of McCarthyism sullied the reputations of many of them, especially the two most prominent: Lauchlin Currie (chief economist in the White House) and Harry Dexter White (chief economist in the Treasury). Close examination of the parallels between these two seemingly disparate cases reveals that recent attempts to revive the charges are no more firmly based than those of the early 1950s.     

Northern Lights: From Swedish Realism to Sociology of Law

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with major books that have influenced the authors. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, and Roger Brownsword.     

Law in Culture

Abstract. The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect. The consequence is that legal theory must, it seems, now systematically take account of the notion of culture. The present paper asks how this might best be done. I argue that a concept of culture, as such, is of limited utility for legal theory because the term “culture” embraces a too indefinite and disparate range of phenomena. But legal theory needs conceptual resources to consider at a general level the relations of law and culture. This paper suggests that these resources should include, above all, a rigorous distinguishing of different abstract types of community. Legal theory requires a sociologically‐informed concept of community. What is encompassed by the vague idea of culture is actually the content of different types of social relations of community and the networks (combinations) in which they exist.