Law in a changing society

Law in a Changing Society is a classic work on contemporary thought. Professor Friedmann writes of the law's great themes-its complex interaction with social change, its intervention into economics and the environment, its balance of public power and private rights, its place in the growth of international order, its own changing role in the interdependent society-with insight, imagination and an exciting breadth of scholarship.
For this second edition, the author has largely rewritten his text and added two new chapters chapter 8, which examines the alternatives of economic competition, public regulation and public enterprise; and a concluding chapter, which examines the changing role of law in the society of the seventies. He sums up in his Preface the developments to which he has responded: "In some areas, such as family law, the last decade has brought fundamental changes in many countries, with respect to divorce, abortion, the status of illegitimate children, matrimonial property, and other matters. The very function and ambit of criminal law and criminal sanction has been put in question by recent developments in social psychology and genetic engineering.
The substitution of insurance for tort liability, particularly in the field of motor car accidents, has become a problem of increasing urgency. The growth of mechanisation, and the centralisation of power, both at the Government and the corporate level, has made a re-examination of the relation between public power and the individual a matter of urgent necessity. The role of international law and organisation in international society has more and more become a question on which the ordered survival of mankind will depend. And any student of the relation of law and society must reflect on the changing function of law in the increasingly interdependent society of the 1970s, as one of a number of interacting components in a complex web of systems analysis, social planning and decision-making"