Injury The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States [Paperback]

Injuryoffers the first sustained anthropological analysis and critique of American injury law. The book approaches injury law as a symptom of a larger American injury culture, rather than as a tool of social justice or as a form of regulation. In doing so, it offers a new understanding of the problematic role that law plays in constructing Americans' relations with the objects they consume.

Through lively historical analyses of consumer products and workplace objects ranging from cigarettes to cheeseburgers and computer keyboards to airbags, Jain lucidly illustrates the real limits of the product safety laws that seek to redress consumer and worker injury. The book draws from a wide range of materials to demonstrate that American law sets out injury as an exceptional state, one that can be redressed through imperfect systems of monetary compensation.Injurydemonstrates how laws are unable to accommodate the ways in which physical differences among citizens are imposed by the physical objects of culture that distribute risk differently among populations. The book moves between detailed accounts of individual legal cases; historical analyses of advertising, product design, regulation, and legal history; and a wide reading of cultural theory.

Drawing on an extensive knowledge of law and social theory, this innovative book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in design, consumption, and the politics of injury.

Sarah S. Lochlann Jainis Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Sarah Lochlann Jain's book puts the 'jury' back into injury. . . .Injurycross-fertilizes several different areas, including but not limited to cultural anthropology, the history of product design, and law and society. ---Simon A. Cole,Technology and Culture With the provocative use of real-world examples,Injuryis a first-rate work of critique. It should be on the reading list of anyl³.