Journal of Law and Society最新文献

This contribution discusses the continued relevance but changing appearance of research connecting law, economy and society in the socio-legal field. It uses the perspective of the Journal of Law and Society (JLS), which indeed seems to be a good place to start, as it kept the economy on the agenda throughout five decades of scholarly production so far. The development of socio-legal scholarship embracing the economic dimension is reconstructed in terms of ‘three generations’, which are linked with historical, realist and constructionist programmes coming to the fore at different times. The respective research paradigms and practices differ by their emphasis on ‘law in’, ‘law and’ or ‘law as’ in its relation to economy and society. This history and the present state of the field are illustrated with articles from the JLS and with regard to what our neighbours in law and economics were and are doing at the same time.

This short essay follows an invitation from this journal to reflect on the relation between socio-legal and critical legal studies over the past 50 years, a period during which the Journal of Law and Society has been one of the primary conduits for scholarship of both persuasions. After interrogating their commonalities and differences, hopes and anxieties, I go on to suggest that legal studies should be oriented by the objective of opening claims for justice, and I argue that this needs to be extended to animal justice.

How do justice professionals, in their everyday practices, reconcile what they regard as their competing obligations: to allow participation and yet to conclude cases efficiently? This article argues that rather than doing so through individual self-talk denying the value of participation, or, by overt pressure on the defendant, professionals need to see evidence of apparent participation, often through the work shown to them by other professionals. ‘Humanisation work’ to inform the court, conducted, for example, by social work and probation staff, is a subtle yet potent way in which defendants are encouraged to admit guilt so as to show that they have been able freely to voice their unique story. The defendant's case can therefore be concluded with little conflict because she appears to the court to show that she freely accepts the legitimacy of its impending punishment. Future research directions are proposed.

This article considers three sites that draw out the contemporary role of gender categories in the home in the context of a wider project on gender decertification. Firstly, the presence of those who are employed to do care work in the home. Secondly, the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and the way in which the parliamentary debates surrounding the introduction of the DAA highlight appropriate and inappropriate areas of legal intervention in the context of gendered ‘intimate’ relationships. Finally, the ways in which gender categories are understood in the interactions between schools/children and parents. Overall, this article argues that contemporary discourse on gender categories and trans inclusion/exclusion has primarily focused on issues within the public sphere, while the realm of the private sphere has been somewhat neglected and would benefit from a renewed focus on feminist engagements with the ways in which gender categories and norms are constructed and reinforced in this setting.

Researchers conducting policy ethnography in conflict environments are faced with a valuable ethical dilemma – is there an ethical standard to determine how a dataset should be pursued in the field? What if the method of pursuing data carries the potential of possibly disrupting one's rapport with the community and being perceived as a partisan ideologically driven researcher with ulterior motives? This question becomes more pronounced in socio-legal, conflict and public policy research in spatially polarized settings of the South. In these settings, knowledge is co-produced through one's own positionality and the nuances of grey areas that do not often feature in aggregated datasets. Scholarship on positionality has questioned whether scholars should explicate their position on the field by pointing towards the intentional or unintentional perpetuation of hierarchies. This paper situates itself in the positionality debate with reference to castelessness in socio-legal research through nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Southern spatially polarized setting. It grapples with an emerging contrasting view of whether researchers should at all engage in explicating their positionality. The paper argues that data is a socio-spatial product. It is to suggest that the production of data in conflict settings is informed by the spatial dynamics of social relations that emerge in the co-production of knowledge, and the researcher's reflexive positionality that itself impacts the outcome of data that emerges.

This article began life as a lecture the author was invited to deliver as part of the Journal's 50th-anniversary celebrations in the summer of 2024. The piece explores how law, literature and socio-legal studies in the United Kingdom have evolved alongside each other since the birth of the Journal of Law and Society in 1974. It examines the Journal's role in this evolution, and how it has provided space for legal scholars, and particularly socio-legal scholars, to critique, problematise and mull over dilemmas common to law and the arts – sometimes by drawing on methods and insights from the arts themselves. In doing so, the author adopts a Gothic framework for further illuminating the Journal's work in this area, arguing that Gothic fiction helps us to confront ghosts and monsters – especially in those places where the law (or, at least, legal scholars) may fear to tread.

Studies of legal pluralism and decolonisation are both concerned with the relationship between law and power, and with understanding how people experience law in practice. Legal pluralists are concerned with decentring the powerful from the study of law, and with centring the voices of those traditionally excluded from conversations about what law is. Decolonialists are likewise concerned with empowering those subjugated by colonial rule, and with understanding how those populations have experienced law in practice. In this paper, I use publications from previous issues of the Journal of Law and Society to tease out these commonalities and to highlight what these fields of studies can teach us about the ways in which the legacies of colonialism shape the plurality of ways in which people experience law in society today.

This essay offers a response to Dr Lizzy Willimington's article and a reflection on the history of critical and socio-legal studies. It points to critique as a normative question rather than a methodological one and discusses this idea through the history of legal needs and legal consciousness research. It draws on the insights of critical race theory to argue that there is no impasse between critical and socio-legal research and advances the idea of ‘multiple consciousness’ as critique.

This brief comment draws on Sabine Frerich's paper to discuss the contribution of the Journal to the study of regulation of the economy, especially in the political context of the 1980s and later. It will concentrate on issues of non-economic values in economic regulation and the role of institutional design, and it will contrast behaviouralist approaches to the study of law and the economy with other approaches emphasising the meaning of social actors and the effect of power relations. My comment suggests that the Journal has played an important role in widening analysis of regulation from a predominantly economic approach to one drawing on a wide range of social values.

‘Why Must Legal Ideas Be Interpreted Sociologically? (1998) presented an argument about methods of juristic inquiry rather than about the nature of sociology of law. It claimed that juristic analysis of legal doctrine must be sociologically grounded. But such an analysis does not thereby become sociology of law, nor does it necessarily promote an instrumental or technocratic view of law. Jurisprudence and sociology of law have fundamentally different objectives. However, sociology, insofar as it is relevant to legal interpretation, should be seen as a study of social relations grounded in values, tradition and emotion, as well as instrumentality. As such, it is needed to inform juristic thought. Correspondingly, sociology of law should be concerned for its own purposes with conceptualising law, taking account of juristic ideas in doing so but not being confined by them.