Whose Law Is It Anyway?

Abstract

Corporate Lawbreaking and Interactive Compliance, edited by Jay A. Sigler and Joseph E. Murphy. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1991. 201 pages. What can and should be the role of private groups in creating and maintaining law? What can and should be the relationship between law-giver and law-receiver? These fundamental questions haunt each of the essays that make up Corporate Lawbreaking and Interactive Compliance (hereinafter Corporate Lawbreaking). These questions, though not the explicit focus of the book, are questions to which the essayists and editors of this book are speaking whether they realize it or not. Seen as a series of discussions on the role of non-state groups in creating and maintaining law, this book is provocative and worth reading. Some of the proposals in this book, if taken seriously, would radically transform our legal system and could transform our democracy. But the book does not self-consciously set out to describe the role of private groups in maintaining law or the relationship between law-giver and law-receiver. It sets out to do something else-to ground with concrete examples a theory that the editors articulated in an earlier book. Judged in light of its professed goal, the book is less successful.