Societal Stress and Law

Societal Stress and Law draws attention to the social side effects of law by developing the sociological concept of society-level stress, a corollary of the concept of individual-level stress in the biological sciences. To encourage interest in societal stress, the book looks at (1) instances of law adopted by American states that the U.S. Supreme Court held unconstitutional and (2) actions by American states with regard to a proposal to amend the federal Constitution. The Court rulings and the proposed constitutional amendment were capable of producing societal stress because they were seen by a sizeable segment of the U.S. public as being incompatible with significant American traditions. In original studies that apply logistic regression to state-level statistical data, the book identifies sociological variables that predict state differences in the adoption of this law and state differences in actions on the proposed constitutional amendment. Because these variables represent societal agents that affected whether a state experienced social stress from the rulings and proposal, the book blends theory with empirical research and illustrates how each can support the other in law-focused scholarship.

Larry D. Barnett is a sociologist (Ph.D., Florida State University) and a lawyer (J.D. with honors, University of Florida; member, Florida Bar). His previously-published books on the macrosociology of law include the two-volume work Societal Agents in Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Explaining Law (Brill, 2015); The Place of Law (Transaction/Routledge, 2011); and Legal Construct, Social Concept (Aldine de Gruyter, 1993). He is also the author of The Biosphere and Human Society (Bristol University Press, 2023); Demography and the Anthropocene (Springer, 2021); and Population Policy and the U.S. Constitution (Kluwer Nijhoff, 1982). From 1978 to 2013, Professor Barnett was on the full-time faculty of the Delaware Law School of Widener University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. During this time, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Leiden University in The Netherlands (1979-1980), and in 1982 he founded Population Research and Policy Review, a journal in demography that he served as editor-in-chief for eleven years.