Considering the paradigm of modernity's three key concepts --law, power, and science--Santos argues for extensive epistemological shifts in the field of critical social thought. He traces the historical process by which both modern science and modern law lost the balance between social regulation and social emancipation inscribed originally in the paradigm of modernity. Pleading for a new dialogic rhetoric and moving back and forth between solid empirical work and highly innovative and far reaching theorizing, he deals with diverse topics.

Presenting perspectives on legal theory and practice, this volume examines how visual images of the law influence interpretation and execution of the law in ways not discernible from written texts.

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, (...) you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.". (shrink)

In the United States, handicapped parking spaces tether the social construction of need to the legal assurance of equality of accessibility. However in places such as Fenway Park in Boston, the threat of terror distorts the intention of these spaces by politically reconfiguring their presence and meaning. As a result, our public interest is legally manipulated and socially challenged to preference the abstraction of threat over real life in even the most ordinary of places.