STUDYING THE CAREERS OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS 241CONCLUSION
We return, then, to the basic idea that legal academics are institutionally “embedded” (Powell and
DiMaggio 1991) in a variety of ways. Legal scholars share certain assumptions with academics
and with Court justices. Legal scholars, working in academic institutions, and justices, working in
legal institutions, also share assumptions and beliefs about, say, race and gender (R.M. Smith
1993). The methods of frame analysis and science studies permit highly specific investigations of
these sorts of characteristics that are shared across such disparate institutional contexts. In gen-
eral, these methods provide a way of generating data about the assumptions that underlie knowl-
edge claims and about the institutional contexts that shape the reception of rival knowledge claims.
These methods also provide a way of analyzing data. We become able to link various levels of the
social totality: the individual, the collective, and the institutional. We become able to understand
the careers of knowledge claims in terms of institutional arrangements and resource distributions.
Without the tools of science studies, especially, these sorts of investigation would be impossible.
NOTES
- U.S. Const., amend. XIV, sec. 1, clause 2, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” (1868). - Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. (2 Pet.) 243 (1833).
- Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542
(1876). - The Reconstruction debates span the thirty-ninth to forty-third congresses (1866–75).
- See, e.g., Fehrenbacher (1962) and Simpson (1998).
- See, e.g., Ross (2003).
- E.g., United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876);
United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883); Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). - Fraser (1995, 160) discusses this challenge as it pertains to feminist scholarship. The goal is to
“connect the discursive analyses of gender significations with structural analyses of institutions and political
economy.” - For overviews of New Historical Institutionalism that situate it relative to behavioral and strategic–
rational choice approaches to the study of public law, see Kahn and Kersch (2006), Gillman (1999), and
Clayton and Gillman (1999). The interpretive-historical approach of NHI, as one might guess, is not entirely
new. There are convergences between NHI and both the pre-behavioralist institutionalism of Corwin (1934)
and Haines (1922), and the “political systems” institutionalism of Dahl (1957) and R. McCloskey (1960).
For a discussion of these convergences, see Clayton and Gillman (1999). - Legal historians have shown that conceptions of judicial roles and purposes can be reconstituted over
time (Siegel 1990; Grossman 2002; and Horwitz 1993). These legal historians have not associated them-
selves with NHI, though their work is clearly relevant for NHI research agendas. - Gusfield (1989, 42) asks an important question: “If frameworks of thought limit and constrain how
experience is conceived, from where do we develop” these frameworks of thought? Tracking the creation
and institutional establishment of frames is a project in and of itself and likely beyond the scope of any frame
analysis. - See Schultz (1990). For other examples, see Eagly and Karau (2002), who explain how beliefs about
women’s character shape the evaluation of women’s leadership potential and the evaluation of women’s
actual leadership behavior. See also Krieger (1995, 1186–211). - The term “appreciation” is taken from Vickers (1983, 187): “a set of readinesses to distinguish some
aspect of the situation rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than that.” The term
“appreciation,” all by itself, blurs the distinction between assumptions and the classifications to which they
give rise. - See, e.g., Schon and Rein’s discussion of the “contrasting frames of discretion and entitlement” in
policy debates over homelessness (1994, 141): “The official frame, sponsored by the public agencies, saw
housing as a scarce resource whose distribution was properly a matter for governmental discretion. The