Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-Legal Studies

Abstract

This chapter considers the place of law in current political debates about how best to address problems of social justice, with particular reference to sex/gender and sexuality. In examining recent ‘moments’ of successful law reform around issues of sex/gender and sexuality, I will argue that the contemporary thirst for law as a route to equality does not address deeper, more structural questions of inequality. Accommodation and assimilation of ‘others’ within the existing legal system will always leave open the question of what social justice could look like were it not understood autopoietically — solely and self-referentially within the confines of existing frameworks of legal rights and responsibilities. What is more, recent moments of sex/gender and sexuality law reform tell us something not only about the gap between law and ‘the social’ but also about the power of law and legal techniques. In this chapter I will explore what happens when, first, legal tools are used to adapt existing doctrinal approaches to include — co-opt — those who previously have fallen outwith the protection of the law; and second, how such techniques fail to deliver justice, despite the good intentions of those who aim for equality (albeit without the kind of radical rethinking that activists and critical scholars might desire).