Exploring the ‘Socio’ or Socio-Legal Studies. By Dermot Feenan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 307pp. $105 Cloth.

Abstract

Exploring the 'Socio' or Socio-Legal Studies. By Dermot Feenan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 307pp. $105 Cloth.In this book, legal scholar and research fellow in law, Dermot Feenan, corrals some of the leading scholars in the field of law and society, legalstudies,aswellasthefocusof the book, sociolegal studies. In writing this review, I found myself initially wanting to simply write that sociolegal studies is a method scholars use to simplify their explanation of what they research. However, each scholar, beginning with Feenan, clearly introduces and explains that the plays a definitive role in sociolegal studies. The distinction, one in which the scholars in the book explore, examines the aspects of the social and society in the legal. That is, there is a two-way road regarding how law effects society and how society effects law.As a legal scholar working in the social sciences, humanities, and the field of law, Feenan is the optimal editor to efficiently gather some of the field's leading scholars on sociolegal studies. Feenan helps explain precisely how and why the study of the socio is important. His claim is that the socio in sociolegal studies involves a doubling of the social, both the subject and method of inquiry (p. 33). Essentially, this means that the problems set by the theoretical frames are sufficiently addressed with this approach. Susan Silbey, a contributor to the book and professor of sociology and anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aptly asks, what do we do with this insight? I suggest that Feenan's array of scholars sufficiently answer that question.The book is broken up into 13 chapters, each providing contextual inquiries into the socio of sociolegal studies. The first several parts, which include six chapters, provide introductions regarding how the notion of socio has been contested and the historical and theoretical inquiries associated with that/those questions. Legal scholars, including, Julia Shaw whose work on law, legal theory, and legal semiotics, posit that language has an ordering function and the unique ability to categorize social subjects and, significantly, it is able to construct the individual by reference to a dominant ideology... (p. 111). This leads one to see that law can form various truths that may help provide legitimacy to the power hierarchies in place. Of course, this also means that those legal hierarchies are able to maintain their structures of power for additional periods of time, even during times of social upheaval. Ultimately, this means that the notion of sociolegal studies needs to widen its audience, particularly by addressing the group of disenfranchised and downtrodden who need the benefits of the law. …