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Rational Law and Boundary Maintenance: Legitimating the 1971 Lockheed Loan Guarantee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Gerald Turkel
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Abstract

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Neo-Marxian critiques of Max Weber's theory of rationality have stressed the ideological role of legal formalism. At the analytic level, however, Weber's theory points to sources of potential conflict between legal formalism and economic rationality. This paper critically reconstructs Weber's perspective for analyzing the boundary maintaining categories of legal discourse. A case study of the 1971 federal loan guarantee to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation demonstrates that while both market ideologies and administrative principles partially bounded the debate over the legislation, this debate did not resolve the question of which businesses should potentially receive government support. This substantive issue raised problems of legal particularism that undermined the universal claims of legal rationality and required an expansion of boundary categories beyond legal formalism, yielding a more economically and politically open discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , 1981 , pp. 41 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Robert Miller for his sustained help in researching the legislative debate over the Lockheed loan guarantee. Margaret Andersen, Alan Block, William Chambliss, Kenneth Eckhardt, David Ermann, Thomas Priest, and Paul Robertshaw provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am especially grateful for the critical comments and suggestions of anonymous Law & Society Review referees. A version of this paper was presented at the 1980 meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society held in Boston.

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