Outlaw: How We Can All Live Better without the Law

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Professor Cindy Skach has spent a lifetime studying the law, determined to create order where it does not exist. She has been to some of the most complex corners of the world to find it. But having become increasingly sceptical of what law can and should do to establish good governance, she came to a radical conclusion: that stable order is an illusion. Changes to the law often amount to little more than bandages on bullet wounds and, more often than we think, make matters worse. Drawing on her own research, teaching and fieldwork in democratic theory and practice over the past three decades, Skach exposes both the seriousness of the challenges to democracy we face, and a solution to them that is profoundly within our reach. She proposes six ideas across six areas we should care about most leadership, public education, race and immigration, the environment, community and fundamental rights and shows us how we can take steps in each of these areas to be better, truer citizens. As Skach argues, now is the time to move outside of our inadequate box of laws and rules and leadership, and instead make democracy work a different way. One citizen at a time.

Author Bio

C.L. SKACH is Professor of Political and Legal Theory at the University of Bologna. She was previously Professor of Constitutional Law at King's College London; the Professor of Comparative Government and Law at the University of Oxford, and prior to that, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, where she was also affiliated and taught in the Harvard Law School. She has conducted research on six continents, held visiting professorships or fellowships in five countries, and has had her research published in seven languages. She lives in Oxford, England. Outlaw is her first trade book.