Stewart Macaulay

Research began by showing the gap between the assumptions of legal scholars who wrote about contracts and business practices related to the same problems. It also showed the limited, but sometimes critical, role of law in the context of long-term continuing relationships. The next group of studies looked at franchise protection laws. Here trade associations had lobbied for legislation that was supposed to change the balance of power between franchisors and franchisees. These laws proved to have limited impact. Other research considered how lawyers deal with consumer protection statutes and the problems that they were supposed to solve when most of them know very little about these reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Other work deals with private government -- that is, non-governmental organizations that take over functions often thought to belong to public government. Still other work considers popular legal culture and theorizes about the impact of the lack of knowledge, distortions and clear misinformation that various publics received from school, mass media, legal fiction appearing in novels, film and television, and spectator sports.