A Brief Note from the New Editors

Abstract

Welcome to Volume 51, Issue 1-the first issue edited by our binational, cross-disciplinary team. We would like to begin this issue by thanking the outgoing editors, by introducing ourselves, and by offering a brief overview of important editorial principles for our team.The journal comes to us after excellent editing work by Tim Johnson and Joachim Savelsberg. Tim and Joachim continue to share great advice for the transition, and have prepared us well to deal with the many issues that arise day-to-day in the job of editing a journal. Tim and Joachim's three-year tenure at Law & Society Review saw the publication of many wonderful articles and issues, including the 50th anniversary issue celebrating LSR's golden anniversary. The LSR's continuing high impact factor is compelling evidence of Tim and Joachim's careful stewardship. Although any new editorship team necessarily involves transition, we will continue many long-standing practices. We continue to look for top quality, innovative scholarship to publish, and to provide effective and full reviewer response to the manuscripts submitted to us. But our new team brings a unique sense of energy and perspective stemming from the team's structure. We are the first team that is a triad-three scholars at three separate institutions (Indiana University, Virginia Tech, University of British Colombia), two located in different areas of the United States, and one in Canada. We represent different perspectives and history in the field and in our profession. Two of us are political scientists, two of us teach in law schools as interdisciplinary legal scholars, one of us teaches in a public policy school. We hope that these three different sites of editorial leadership allow us to contribute to the work our predecessors have done broadening LSR's reach.As scholars, one of our common points is an interest in how individuals respond to the construction by law of subject positions. Canadian legal scholars have been particularly engaged in exploring indigenous legal questions and Margot Young brings a commitment to that expansion of law and society coverage, along with feminist and social justice expertise. Jeannine Bell has long worked on the intersecting issues of law, crime, and racial injustice with scholarship that is focused on hate crime, hate speech, and policing, and how these concerns affect the lives of racial minorities in the United States. Susan Sterett has worked on multilevel analyses of crafting social welfare and other membership claims by race and gender, working both from appellate courts cases and from interview data to analyze those who organize claims and those who make individual claims. In our work we use a range of approaches to data collection, ranging from ethnography to analysis of survey data.Even though our work touches on many different areas in socio-legal research, we recognize the need for assistance from specialists in areas with which we are less familiar. We have assembled a team of associate editors and advisory board members who capture a broad array of socio-legal scholarship across the globe. Our advisory board includes sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and legal scholars, who teach in variety of departments in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their names and institutional affiliations are listed in the front pages. …