Symposium Introduction: Herb Jacob's Legacy to Sociolegal Research

Abstract

Herb Jacob's unexpected death abruptly ended nearly 35 years of important, innovative scholarship. He began his career in the early 1960s during legal realism's rebirth, and he actively participated in the creation of the Law and Society Association, later serving as its president. Herb adopted both the law and society movement's interdisciplinary perspective and legal realism's positivist approach to the study of legal institutions while rejecting the upper court bias held by the political science profession of which he was a member. For many sociolegal scholars, Herb blazed a trail in thinking about and researching the lower courts. He was a prolific scholar, producing 17 books and publishing 28 articles and chapters in books. Herb's curiosity and intellectual interests were not limited to law and the courts, however. He also published two books dealing with social science methods (Jacob and Weissberg 1970; Jacob 1984b). His edited textbook on state politics established an unchallenged standard in this area of political science; it has withstood the test of time and gone through several editions since its publication in 1965 (Jacob 1965b). Herb's first book, based on his Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University and published in 1963, analyzed public administration in Germany (Jacob 1963a). Like his text on state politics, this book had lasting value and was reprinted in 1974. Herb once