The Limits of the Legal Process: A Study of Landlords, Law and Crime

THE LIMITS

OF THE

LEGAL PROCESS

A Study of Landlords, Law and Crime

David Nelken

Classics of Law & Society

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Copyright © 1983, 2013 by David Nelken. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, copying its digital form, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the current publisher.

Previously published in 1983 by Academic Press, Inc. (London and New York); and copyright © 1983 by David Nelken. This is an unabridged and authorized republication of the original work, as part of the series Classics of Law & Society.

Published in 2013 by Quid Pro Books in the Smashwords Edition, at Smashwords.

ISBN 978-1-61027-188-2 (eBook)

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Author photograph on About the Author page courtesy Henry Pontell, used with permission.

Contents

Preface • 2013

The Limits of the Legal Process (republished here without change) is based on a PhD thesis in criminology initiated at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in the 1970s and awarded in 1981.¹ Given that this book was published a generation ago, in 1983, and has long been out of print, it would be reasonable to wonder whether it is outdated. The publisher and those that counselled him obviously think not.² But the case needs to be made. The task of this short preface is to say something about its possible continuing relevance, both in terms of the processes by which it saw the light, and the influence and validity of the arguments it contains. But it is the reader interested enough to go on and read it who will be in the best position to say whether the book has any enduring value.

Behind the Book

To write without self-indulgence of his own work it would help for an author to be blessed with the wit of the late Steven Box, as shown in his wonderful ironic prefaces to Deviance, Reality and Society.³ But some justification for such reflection can also come from trying to offer insight into the often ‘messy’ circumstances of ‘scientific’ production. The brief account that I will provide here confirms the gulf between research methods as prescriptions of what ought to happen and the actual practice of doing research, as has been well illustrated by those writers who have written about the research process in recent collections.⁴

Hopefully my particular saga may also give some comfort to those who struggle over their PhDs and think that their work (or that of their students) has been misjudged. It is I assume rare, if not unprecedented, that a PhD thesis that is sent away for radical rewriting when first presented for examination shortly afterwards wins a prize in the USA as the best book in criminology published in the previous five years,⁵ and later goes on to be described as ‘a social legal classic’. This does perhaps suggest that the PhD examining process remains a particularly subjective exercise even as other examination protocols are being tightened up. This account also demonstrates the uncertain and unpredictable relationship between the way research is produced and how it is received.

Getting this PhD approved was in fact far from unproblematic (but then one of the examiners explained to me seriously that he did not think that getting a PhD at Cambridge should be easy!). The story begins when, as a student on the then Diploma in Criminology at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, I was inspired to go on to further research by a brilliant guest lecture on occupational deviance given by Gerald Mars (who has since become a close friend). I felt that a doctorate project dealing with ‘white collar crime’ would allow me to study ‘up’, focusing on the (relatively) powerful, rather than studying ‘down’—the behaviour of the usual suspects of the criminal courts. Drawing on in-law family connections with dentists my original plan was to compare the deviance of some dentists, whose methods of defrauding National Health System payments were carefully neutralized by the systems of control dealing with them, with the social response to those landlords whose behaviour in using self-help to resolve their disputes had recently been criminalised.

But the project so conceived led to increasingly biting comments. When one of the professors teased me asking ‘are the dentists also landlords?’ I began to lose heart. To find a precedent for my allegedly bizarre comparative exercise I eventually tracked down a sociological PhD thesis in the Cambridge University Library (by a scholar who went on later to become a very well known academic) that compared architects to railwaymen. Reading right through to the end with increasing impatience in the desperate search for enlightenment I eventually discovered that the author’s main justification for his project was that the two occupations had never been compared before!

Abandoning my original plan, I concentrated on the landlord part of the thesis. This had been inspired by radio recording of a parliamentary debate over the enforcement of the 1965 Rent Acts with respect to the part aimed at curbing harassment and illegal eviction of tenants. One speaker in the parliamentary debate complained that, even after the Rent Acts, so called ‘Legal Rachmans’ were able to achieve the same ends as Perec Rachman, the infamous landlord who had made money by forcing tenants of controlled tenancies to leave their homes. I was intrigued by what these new methods might be—and equally, interested to know what was being done by (and to) those landlords who were being apprehended under the Act. I therefore set out to investigate what large and other commercial landlords did that was classifiable as ‘not properly criminal’. At the same time I obtained permission to follow anti-harassment officers in their work in a variety of poor London local government areas so as to discover more about the landlords who were actually being prosecuted.⁶

In the writing-up of the PhD, I did not describe all the expedients I adopted in order to find the answers to my questions, still less were they fit to be included in the published book. But this means that I did not come clean about some of the methods I used to gain information about the practices of the powerful. For example, it was only by poking around in cupboards while working temporarily at a large commercial landlord that I was able to come across gems such as the internal instructions that classified their secret practices including the manipulation of Rent Tribunals. These instructions referred to directives so secret that even their existence as directives was not to be divulged outside a small circle (see chapter 2 of this book).

In searching through property files for useful information I was also helped by a sort of implicit understanding of non-belligerence with the person in charge of them. (He sat in the bowels of the building, surrounded by various food delicacies he had abstracted from local shops, reading a book about how to make bombs!) After engineering a shift of workplace to the ‘tame’ lawyers situated next door, to my chagrin I was presented to them (in a room decorated with endless photos of the Royals) as someone who had been studying criminology. I was then really taken aback by being asked by the lawyers if I had seen much criminality while working there! Fortunately I kept my mouth shut (even whilst hoping for the earth to swallow me up)—and they quickly went on to explain that they were referring to their tenants!

Any current methodological advice on how to do research on the powerful has thus to be tempered by the recognition that this sort of research could no longer be done (for better or worse) with the research ethics codes and consent forms that have to be complied with nowadays.⁷ It would certainly have been impossible to obtain the agreement of this landlord for me to carry out such investigations into their misbehaviour if I had been upfront about this. Technically speaking my observation work was in fact carried out whilst I was employed on a ‘holiday job’, after completing my masters in criminology and before being accepted to do a PhD. But this is beside the point. I was aware that I was not being honest with my employers, but I quietened my conscience by telling myself that I was not out to ‘expose’ them and that there was no other way of learning about misbehaviour by a group that deliberately set out to monitor and manipulate what was said about it.⁸

In the end, however, getting hold of the data turned out to be less challenging than convincing the PhD examiners. My academic post in Edinburgh University had been made conditional on my PhD being completed and accepted. With two small children to support and the winds of recession blowing, I turned up for my viva examination in 1981 little expecting that the examiners would not be happy with it. This bad news was given to me over lunch just before the viva by my patient Cambridge supervisor, Professor Nigel Walker. I did not enjoy the lunch. The examiners, it turned out, were particularly critical of what they saw as its eclecticism. They worried about its attempt to combine approaches as different as Marxism and symbolic interactionism. They therefore asked for a rewrite which would succeed in showing, in their words, how the theories drawn on in the thesis were ‘epistemologically and ontologically coherent’.⁹

It was not clear to me whether anything more lay behind their objections. For some scholars the 1980s was a period involving battles over the role of Marxism in the academy. I did not know whether this was true in my case, but because that suggestion had been made I felt it was better to be safe than sorry. In the rewrite I regretfully took out the final chapter called ‘Harassment and Hegemony’, which had examined the relevance of Gramsci’s ideas for the reproduction of consensus¹⁰ (the highly relevant point here being the claim accompanying this Labour party legislation that law could be used to catch the misbehaviour of the powerful¹¹). Even so, the problem still remained. How was I to provide theoretical coherence to a wide-ranging thesis whose strong points, if any, lay in the write-up of its empirical observations rather than its theoretical aspirations?

Instead of attempting to provide a synthesis of the various sociological theories I had drawn on, I decided that all that I could do was to add a lengthy appendix critiquing the very idea that ‘theory’ could be coherent, or anything other than an effort to synthesise different approaches (as is readily evident for example in the use Weber made of Dilthey in his argument that explanation had to be ‘adequate at the level both of cause and meaning’). The need for a careful eclecticism was all the more obvious, I argued, where the researcher is asked to deal, in the course of an empirical enquiry, with a variety of topics at different levels and distinct kinds of questions.

Was it plausible to think that the same (type of) theory could help with questions as different as the structural place of landlords in the class system and the reasons why disputes between landlords and tenants took place? It was one thing to try to explain why local government harassment officers tasked with enforcing the Rent Acts sought to prosecute immigrant landlords. Another to understand why those framing criminal law in Parliament faced difficulties in penalising the conduct likely to be engaged in by commercial landlords. To make these points (not wishing to attack my examiners directly!) I used as a straw man a recent book by Grace and Wilkinson that had argued for the need for more theoretical consistency in sociology of law.¹² Fortunately the strategy worked. At the re-examination of the thesis the examiners complimented me on my critique but assured me that they themselves had never wished to make such strong claims about the need for coherence.¹³

Despite having been accepted as a book well before the debacle of the PhD viva, the process of subsequent publication also did not go entirely smoothly. The bland and unwieldy title The Limits of the Legal Process: A Study of Landlords, Law and Crime, was a late compromise. It was certainly not my original proposal. I had wanted to call the book Harassing Landlords—the point being the double meaning of the phrase, given that the book describes the effects of legislation passed to deal with landlords who harass their tenants but also showed how the law was used in practice to harass some small immigrant landlords. It was never entirely clear why this title (and other proposed titles involving talk about criminal landlords) was not accepted. This book was negotiated by a literary agent¹⁴ who told me that the Publishing Company did not like the idea of coupling landlords with crime. (There are shades here of the great Edwin Sutherland not being able to give the names of the businesses whose violations he catalogued in his path-breaking book on white collar crime—because his publisher could have risked libel action for calling respectable businessmen criminals!) But perhaps, more prosaically, they simply disliked titles with double meanings.¹⁵

Assessing the Book’s Influence

Like most PhD books, this one did not have a big impact. Published only as an expensive hardback, a study describing a localised empirical research project, at a time when sociology of law in UK was not well developed, was never going to have a large market.¹⁶ Even after the battering it got as a PhD it also still remained somewhat eclectic in the range of approaches used. And, perhaps, leaving out of the chapter on Gramsci made the book less interesting than it might have been! Its reception may also have been negatively influenced by the fact that (caught up with personal problems) I did not try to get the book better known by publishing journal articles based around its chapters. The only paper in which I explicitly reworked this case study is one in which I used ideas from Steven Lukes and Anthony Giddens to examine the ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ constraints on legislation seen as a form of ‘controlled social change’.¹⁷ On the other hand, working at the prestigious Edinburgh law faculty, an outstanding centre for philosophy of law, criminology and socio-legal studies, meant that I was stimulated to keep in touch with (and occasionally contribute to) unfolding debates in the field. In particular, I continued to think through the ‘limits’ of an instrumental approach to law more generally¹⁸ (and not just in terms of the contingent outcomes of a given legislative project).

Some people did say nice things about the book. A broadly positive review by Keith Hawkins¹⁹ in the British Journal of Criminology surprised me by saying that he appreciated my ability to write interesting things about the ‘boring’ topic of landlords. I feared the truth might be just the opposite! Another review by Anne Stewart²⁰ in Contemporary Crises, a more ‘critical’ and less mainstream journal, was even more positive. One of the private reactions that gave me most pleasure was receiving a long personal letter from Jack Katz²¹ in which he described the chapters in the book drawing on ethnomethodology (chapters 5 and 6) as ideal examples of the genre, explaining that that he used them as models in his teaching.²² You cannot please everyone of course. My friend Maureen Cain²³ told me later that she used my book in the methods course she taught at Cambridge also to illustrate what should not be done!

Then, in 1985 (at a time which could not have been better for cheering me up), I won the equivalent of the lottery. The American Sociological Association (Criminology section) wrote to tell me that they had awarded my book (jointly with one by the social historian Robert Nye) a Distinguished Scholar award as ‘one of the best books in criminology published in the previous five years’.²⁴ And, much later, as sociology of law matured in the UK, the book also came to be seen as a pioneering text in that field. David Cowan,²⁵ for example (not even a friend, so thank you, David!), refers to it regularly in his writings as a ‘socio-legal classic’. ‘Hence, at its best, this book can be seen as an effort to bring together the areas of sociology of law and criminology, at a time when sociology of law was much less developed than now, and criminologists were still rather more interested in explaining the causes of crime than the politics of criminal justice’.²⁶ But I only fully realized that what I had written was principally a contribution to the sociology of law well after the thesis was completed and I had obtained a job as lecturer in sociology of law in the law faculty of Edinburgh—one of the first posts in that subject in the UK.

What, finally, is the book really about? And have its arguments stood the test of time?²⁷ The author (as the New Criticism has taught us) is not the only or even the best authority on the interpretation of his or her work. But some guidance may be found in later citations as monitored by Google Scholar. In these terms, its most obvious contribution lies in the relevance of its arguments for the regulation of the housing market and, more specifically, efforts to curb misbehaviour by residential landlords. Later studies of housing and homelessness still make reference to its findings,²⁸ which were unexpected and controversial at the time. It was then widely assumed (especially by those on the Left) that the limits of the law in controlling landlords were a result of unenthusiastic enforcement and low fines, rather than, as the book suggests, fundamental differences between the problems faced and solutions found to them by resident and commercial private landlords.²⁹

This book also fits squarely in the tradition of works demonstrating how social problems are ‘constructed’. Unlike much of the earliest literature on ‘moral panics’ and ‘folk devils’, this study set out to show how reactions to ‘social problems’, as managed in organisations and reported by the media, involve processes of both exaggeration and denial.³⁰ The landlords who finished up before the magistrates courts posed legal actors with particularly difficult challenges if they were to be shown as corresponding to the stereotype of malicious capitalists. But the processes uncovered in this case-study could be and were later successfully generalised to the ordinary work of the criminal courts and the problem of getting behind all prosecution ‘constructions’ of guilt.³¹

Like most case-studies, the book also sought to speak to larger matters, here, above all, the connections between (criminal) law, power and social change. An unusual feature of this study (facilitated of course by the recency of the law in question) was the way it described both the making and the breaking of the law in question. Later commentators have well understood that my aim was to get away from the common so-called ‘impact’ studies of legislation or court decisions. The book recognised the difficulty of defining and measuring the ‘consequences’ of legal interventions, and the questions begged by the social engineering approach to law it subsumed.³² What was also original, but perhaps less noticed,³³ was its attempt to demonstrate how taking a synoptic viewpoint makes it possible to go beyond the all too familiar reports of a ‘gap’ between legislative promise and outcomes³⁴ so as to examine instead what those involved in the enforcement and adjudicating of such laws actually do about covering up such disjunctures in the different sites in which successive ‘transformations of reality’ occur. The proliferation of second-hand and third-hand sampling of news concerning social problems from around the world makes the need for such analyses increasingly important.

How come that, even under the best of circumstances (a popular Labour government dealing with a scandal-ridden category of businessmen), the criminal law ended up dealing yet again only with the socially and politically weakest offenders?³⁵ What variety of factors explains what I characterised as ‘coherence without conspiracy’, and how far can such obstacles be overcome? The difficulty of effectively controlling white-collar and business crime continues to obsess me. My writing on this subject in successive editions of the leading textbook The Oxford Handbook of Criminology is in fact likely better known than this largely forgotten book. But already here I developed the hypothesis that when it comes to powerful actors the only practical possibility may be to seek ‘regulation without stigmatisation’. My interest in what Doreen MacBarnet later described as ‘creative compliance’³⁶ can also be traced back to this book and its investigation of the tactics used by commercial landlords to turn the allegedly anti-landlord Rent Acts to their advantage. The wider issues the book raised remain unresolved. What are the intrinsic limits to law’s ability to treat ‘normal’ commercial behaviour as crime? If such behaviour mutates over time as part of the changing organisation of capitalistic economies, what happens to these limits? Are we now going forwards or backwards?³⁷

D. N.     

Footnotes

1 The empirical research it documents was carried out between 1971 and 1975 and describes and explains some of the outcomes of legislation passed in 1965.

2 For the opportunity to republish the book I would like to thank Alan Childress, the polymathic publisher of Quid Pro Books, as well as Malcolm Feeley and others for suggesting the idea.

3 Holt, Rinehart and Winston, first edition 1971. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that (at least amongst some of his colleagues) the preface became more famous than the book.

4 See, in our fields, for example, Victor Jupp, Pamela Davies, and Peter Francis, Doing Criminological Research, Sage, 2000; Roy King and Emma Wincup eds., Doing Research on Crime and Justice, OUP, 2007; Simon Halliday and Patrick Schmidt eds., Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Practices, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Louise Westmarland ed., Researching Crime and Justice: Tales from the Field, Routledge, 2011; and Kristel Beyens, Jenneke Christiaens, Bart Claes, Steven De Ridder, Hanne Tournel, and Hilde Tubex, The Pains of Doing Criminological Research, Academic and Scientific Publishing Brussels, 2013.

5 Beating into runner-up position (as my friend Malcolm Feeley never ceases cheerfully to remind me) his wonderful The Process is the Punishment, Russell Sage, 1979/1992, which is still in print.

6 Starting from this need to solve a puzzle rather than from a position I wished to advance may account both for what is good in this study as well as some of the incomprehension it later generated.

7 See Feeley’s ‘Presidential Address: The Rule of Law and Institutional Review Boards’, Law & Society Review, 41 (2007): 757-776.

8 The difficult choices in revealing the secrets of the powerful have recently been posed in incomparably more serious circumstances by whistleblowers who have exposed US military and state secrets, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden; their situation is all the more ambiguous as the United States has some of the most advanced legislation protecting and rewarding those who report on fraud and corruption in the organisations to whom employees would normally be obliged to show loyalty.

9 The Examiners Report is referred to explicitly by Nigel Walker in his foreword where he writes, ‘During the writing of this book the author had to face critics who expected it to be an illustration of some unified explanation. It is his insistence that false alternatives in sociological explanation need to be transcended which puts his book on a higher level’. To which the rider may be added that distinguishing between ‘false’ and ‘genuine’ alternatives in sociological explanation is not always straightforward.

10 Arguably, this chapter had also provided some overall theoretical synthesis of the findings. The difficult problem of disentangling hegemonic and counter-hegemonic uses of law continues to be central for those with progressive aims. See, for some recent case-studies, David Nelken, ‘Corruption as governance’, in Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann eds., Rules of Law, Laws of Ruling (Ashgate, 2009): 275-295, and David Nelken, ‘Human Trafficking and Legal Culture’, Israel Law Review, 43 (2011): 479-513.

11 Had I kept in the Gramsci chapter this study might have made a contribution to the important debate over E. P. Thompson’s claims about the rule of law as ‘an unqualified human good’. See E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Allen Lane, 1975; and commentary e.g. Morton J. Horwitz, 'The Rule of Law: An Unqualified Human Good?’, Yale Law Journal 86 (1977): 561-566; Adrian Merritt, ‘The Nature and Function of Law: A Criticism of E. P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters’, British Journal of Law and Society 7(2) (1980): 194-214; Alan Hunt, ‘The Ideology of Law: Advances and Problems in Recent Applications of the Concept of Ideology to the Analysis of Law’, Law & Society Review, 19 (1985): 11-38.

12 Clive Grace and Philip Wilkinson, Sociological Inquiry and Legal Phenomena, Collier Macmillan, 1978.

13 I left the appendix out of the published book. There has been a spate of literature since then that specifically addresses the question of how to mix approaches when dealing with different questions—the issue that I, perhaps too innocently, thought did not need demonstration.

14 I had been advised by the Series editor to use a well known agent for the negotiations with the publisher—an unthinkable luxury—never repeated since!

15 I made an effort to change the title this time round, but once again a publisher advised against it, explaining that the book was now inseparable from its name.

16 A book focusing on English housing law was unlikely to generate much interest amongst academics in the USA (even after winning a criminology prize)—and, in the days before the internet, information in any case traveled more slowly. Lawrence Friedman, a very distinguished scholar of legal history and sociology of law at Stanford University, did note it. But he reads everything—and had also himself written a book about landlords and law in the USA.

17 David Nelken, ‘Legislation and its Constraints: A Case-Study of the British 1965 Rent Act’, in Dinesh Khosla, Chris Whelan, and Adam Podgorecki eds., Legal Systems and Social Systems, Croom Helm 1985, pp.70-87. I still think that the study of legislation can offer one of the most interesting observation points to see how society is simultaneously maintained and changed.

18 See David Nelken, ‘Beyond the Study of Law and Society’, in American Bar Foundation Journal (1986): 323-338. Much of the theorising of the 1980s and 1990s drew on thinkers as different as Pashukanis and Luhmann to challenge the idea that law could achieve the goals of social transformation dear to the hearts of the early founders of socio-legal studies in the USA. But reaction to the recent neo-liberal stress on the market at the expense of the state may lead to a rediscovery of the value and the feasibility of goal-oriented state intervention.

19 Recently retired from the post of Professor of Socio-Legal studies at Oxford University.

20 A colleague from Warwick University law department, then specialising in housing law.

21 A leading criminological theorist from the University of California at Los Angeles.

22 Others with very different theoretical starting points have found the chapters on court decision-making useful. See, e.g., the Luhmannian analysis by Rasmus Wandall in his Decisions to Imprison: Court Decision-making Inside and Influences Outside the Law, Ashgate, 2008.

23 Maureen Cain, a major pioneering figure in criminology and sociology of law, was one who really did suffer from anti-Marxist bias in the academy. After spending eight fruitful years teaching in the West Indies she then returned to the UK where she became President of the British Criminology Society.

24 My thesis supervisor duly sent the good news to the examiners. They replied—of course—that they had always thought highly of the thesis!

25 A leading socio-legal expert on housing, and, until recently, Chairman of the UK socio-legal association.

26 There was certainly some cross-fertilisation between the sociology of crime and the sociology of law-making and implementation. It is enough to think of the ‘labelling school’ in criminology. But such work had mainly been carried out in the USA and was in any case criticised for focusing only on lower-level state officials and ignoring the larger context.

27 This question is less obvious than it seems. If the social sciences really wanted to emulate the hard sciences then—on one view of ‘normal science’—the question would be rather whether a given study played a part in pushing research ahead before inevitably and necessarily having its approaches or findings overturned.

28 See especially David Cowan and Alex Marsh, ‘New Labour, Same Old Tory Housing Policy? Trust, Distrust and Betrayal: A Social Housing Case Study’, Modern Law Review 72(2) (2001): 157-81; David Cowan and Alex Marsh eds., Two Steps Forward: Housing Policy Into the Next Millennium, Policy Press, 2001; David Hughes and Stuart Lowe eds., The Private Rented Housing Market: Regulation or Deregulation?, Ashgate, 2007.

In his chapter in the latter book at page 144, David Hughes talks of ‘the seminal work of David Nelken, which demonstrated the very weak effect law has on the actual conduct of relationships within the sector’. He also comments on the difficulty of seeing that the tenant’s home is also the landlord’s house. See also Helen Carr and Caroline Hunter in ‘Managing Vulnerability: Homelessness Law and the Interplay of the Social, the Political and the Technical’, Journal of Social Welfare & Family Law (2008): 293-307.

John Allen and Linda McDowell in Landlords and Property: Social Relations in the Private Rented Sector, Cambridge University Press, 1989, tell us (still at that date) that: ‘The issue of private landlordism in Britain touches a raw political nerve’.

29 These findings were particularly true of the socially deprived areas investigated in London—and less relevant elsewhere. But harassment and illegal eviction were in fact concentrated in such areas. In any case there were always some activists who were still not convinced by my account—many of whom would refuse to provide any landlords with legal assistance.

30 Criticism of the way misleading accounts are socially constructed links back to the way scholars themselves cover up the messy parts of their endeavours, as mentioned in the first section of this preface. Mark Kessler concludes his online book review of Halliday and Schmidt (2009) by asking for more theoretical reflection on the implications of academic accounts of how research is produced:

‘Do we provide descriptions and explanations of social reality? Or is that reality constructed by that which we study, law for example, and by the research that we produce? If research and method are social practices, what do those practices produce?’ Law and Politics Book Review, 19(4) (Nov. 2009): 814-818.

A focused discussion of the relationship between the production of academic accounts and the construction of social problems between them may be found in my ‘Immigrant Beach Selling along the Italian Adriatic Coast: De-Constructing a Social Problem’, in Paul Ponsaers and Ronnie Lippens eds., ‘The Informal Economy Re-visited: Organisational Process, Occupational Culture, Informal Economies, and Crime’, special issue of Crime, Law and Social Change (2007): 297-313.

31 My old friend Andrew Sanders (currently chairman of the heads of UK law schools), generously and repeatedly acknowledged the influence of my book in his seminal paper ‘Constructing the Case for the Prosecution’, Journal of Law and Society, 14 (1987): 229-253. He then went on to co-write the highly influential The Case for the Prosecution: Police Suspects and the Construction of Criminality, together with Michael McConville and Roger Leng (Routledge, 1993).

32 The book figures as one of the case studies discussed in W.A. (Bill) Bogart’s Consequences: The Impact of Law and Its Complexity, University of Toronto, 2002.

33 The book made it explicit that this was its overriding concern, and it is a thread that runs through most of the chapters. But perhaps this needed more elaboration