Afterwords to Socio-Legal Generation: Essays in Honour of Michael Adler

Perhaps not surprisingly, the chapters in this volume devoted to the socio-legal contributions of Professor (emeritus) Michael (“Mike”) Adler, are a lot like Mike himself: immediately engaging, unassuming, richly theoretical in imagination without (much) use of jargon, strikingly well informed on the details of politics, policy, and law, concerned with compelling issues like social welfare, prisons, and due process, grounded in history, both of the past and the present. Like others in this generation, Mike’s interest in administrative justice went along with a deep awareness of the deficits in contemporary societies of racial and social justice. As welfare and authoritarian interventions both become more plausible across the globe, the fundamental questions that gave rise to the modern socio-legal movement since the 1960s have become new again. What forms of inequality are being recast and reproduced even as governments claim to shift their attention away from elites? How can the possibilities of justice latent in the classical model of legal due process be realized in a world of increasing administrative power?