Law and the Search for Community

Now in its 2010 edition with a new Foreword, the 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 by UCLA law professor Joel Handler, first published by Penn Press in 1990, studies the problem of law and community targeted at specific problems that still resonate today:  health care, medical consent, water pollution, special ed, and care for the growing elderly and poor. He considers not only theories of justice and administrative process, but also their real applications to people caught in the machine of government dependency and mystification. Part of the Quid Pro series of the essential canon of broader law study, Handler's book now speaks in a quality digital format with active index, footnotes, and contents.

From the 2010 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.  While examining new political ideologies and welfare state transformations, and revealing that little has changed in the overall outcome of welfare programs, he always provides us with a reason to continue to believe in humanitarian reform, reform which treats dependent persons as autonomous decisionmakers rather than objects of bureaucratic discretion and reform which leads to substantive change in the lives of the marginal and poor rather than merely formal equality."

At UCLA, Handler teaches Law and the Poor and a seminar on comparative welfare. He is a past president of the Law & Society Association and the award-winning author of Down From Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment (1996).  He has published more than ten other acclaimed books, including Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality (2006); and Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe--The Paradox of Inclusion (2004).  He is a graduate of Princeton College and Harvard Law School.