Stuart Henry - Private Justice: Towards Intergrated Theorising in the Sociology of Law

Routledge Revivals

This book, first published in 1983, looks at discipline in industry and shows how private justice is integrally bound up with formal law. It is a timely examination of the forms of social control that exist ostensibly outside the formal legal system but on which it crucially depends. Private Justice: Towards Integrated Theorising in the Sociology of Law will be of interest to students of law, sociology, and criminology.

Dr. Stuart Henry is currently Professor and Director of the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University where he has been since 2006. Since leaving Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University) in 1983 he has held positions in the United States at Eastern Michigan University, Wayne State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author or editor of 30 books and over 100 articles on crime, deviance and social control.

Towards Integrated Theorising in the Sociology of Law

Stuart Henry

First published in 1983

by Routledge & Kegan Paul

This edition first published in 2015

by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1983 Stuart Henry

The right of Stuart Henry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 83010926

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-91170-3 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-69247-0 (ebk)

PRIVATE JUSTICE

TOWARDS INTEGRATED THEORISING IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW

STUART HENRY

For Sally Miller whose private justice was very rough

First published in 1983
by Routledge & Kegan Paul pic
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Set in IBM Century, 10 on 12 pt
by Hope Services, Abingdon
and printed in Great Britain by
The Thetford Press, Norfolk
Stuart Henry 1983
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the publisher,
except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Henry, Stuart.

Private justice.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Law Philosophy. 2. Justice, Administration of.
3. Sociological jurisprudence. 4. Social control.
I. Title.
K240.H46 1983 340'.11 83-10926

ISBN 0-7100-9703-4

I owe sincere thanks to: James Cornford, director of the Nuffield Foundation, for his early enthusiasm for the project; Gerald Mars, the supportive and encouraging director of the Centre for Occupational and Community Research where the research for this book was carried out; the Social Science Research Council who funded the study; Ann Lea whose secretarial and administrative wizardry together with total loyalty to the project, sustained us through bureaucratic obstacles and enabled her to type a sheer mountain of words; Rue Bendall of Warwick University's Department of Law, without whom the theoretical underpinning of this book would have been much less developed draw on her dissertations, '"Legal" pluralism: a critique of holistic conceptions of law' and 'Towards an integrative approach to the study of law' both mimeo, University of Kent, 1981 and 1982 respectively; Ruth Shelley who not only managed to squeeze editing and typing the manuscript into an already overcomplicated life and did so more for love than money, but who also provided the inspiration necessary for the book's completion; and to Philippa Brewster of Routledge for her tolerance in accommodating to delays, excuses, problems and disasters.

A special thanks is due to all those people who so generously allowed me to use their time, thoughts and words. Such is the parasitic nature of authorship that without the preparedness of ordinary people to 'be researched', books would be of considerably less value and certainly of less interest.

To safeguard the confidentiality of individuals and organisations, all names appearing in chapters 4 to 6 and the appendix are fictitious.

This book is about the law and justice that goes on outside of the formal legal system. It is about the private systems of social control that operate in institutions, organisations and groups. But it is also about formal law, since my central argument is that formal law and private justice are integrally related. Each is mutually interdependent upon the other such that some of the relations of one are the relations of the other and vice versa. The position is taken that in order to understand law in society it is necessary to understand the nature of this interdependence between the public and private, the formal and informal, the part and the whole. Theorising which seeks to clarify and separate law as distinct from other forms of social control, or that which analyses informal or private justice in isolation from the formality, is guilty of contributing to the ideological process whereby law is constructed as a reality. This book sets out to expose such a process.

I did not begin the research on which Private Justice is based with this approach in mind. Rather, drawing on an interest and understanding of hidden and informal institutions which seem to proliferate in any society, I began with the view that private justice existed as a separate, alternative form of justice and one which might promise us a glimpse of future forms of law suitable to post-capitalist or even socialist legality. In the course of the research it became apparent that this view was simply wrong. Not only was it found that state law relies upon private justice to exercise some of its control functions, but private justice itself relies on state law to exercise its discipline. The one form is not separate from the other but each are necessary parts of the other. At the same time, however, each part has its own limited autonomy. They exist together as mutually dependent but semi-autonomous parts of a totality of social control. Theorising which subsumes private justice as a function of state law, absorbs and denies the autonomy of informal institutions, but that which acknowledges and elaborates such autonomy has so far failed to show how it is limited by the structure of the totality. This book, then, seeks to integrate these approaches and to transcend the dichotomy between structure and agency, part and whole, state law and private justice. It aims to demonstrate that whatever private justice is, it is not wholly private.