Abstract
AbstractCultures of legal and socio-legal scholarship, like legal cultures themselves, are shaped by their respective historical, cultural, economic, and socio-political context. Socio-legal—or law and society—studies are thus pursued and taught differently in different parts of the world. This Article suggests making socio-legal studies the object of comparative research, so as to understand and explain commonalities, differences, and context dependencies in socio-legal scholarship and teaching in different countries. Such comparative endeavors help to translate between different academic languages and to critically reflect upon one’s own research methods and system of legal education. They prove useful for scholars planning research in other parts of the world or engaging in cross-country collaborative research projects, and for research institutions and policymakers involved in reforming research funding and legal education. But how do we go about comparing socio-legal studies? More specifically, why, what, and how do we compare, and what are the challenges that we may face when pursuing such comparative endeavors? This Article gives an overview of potential research questions that a comparison between socio-legal studies may address, the sources that comparativists may draw on, the methods such a comparative endeavor may use to collect and analyze data, and the challenges researchers may face when attempting to compare socio-legal studies in different parts of the world.
Highlights
Cultures of legal and socio-legal scholarship, like legal cultures themselves, are shaped by their respective historical, cultural, economic, and socio-political context
This Article suggests making sociolegal studies the object of comparative research, so as to understand and explain commonalities, differences, and context dependencies in socio-legal scholarship and teaching in different countries. Such comparative endeavors help to translate between different academic languages and to critically reflect upon one’s own research methods and system of legal education. They prove useful for scholars planning research in other parts of the world or engaging in cross-country collaborative research projects, and for research institutions and policymakers involved in reforming research funding and legal education
How do we go about comparing socio-legal studies? why, what, and how do we compare, and what are the challenges that we may face when pursuing such comparative endeavors? This Article gives an overview of potential research questions that a comparison between socio-legal studies may address, the sources that comparativists may draw on, the methods such a comparative endeavor may use to collect and analyze data, and the challenges researchers may face when attempting to compare socio-legal studies in different parts of the world
Summary
Studying institutions of socio-legal scholarship provides us with insights about the locales in which socio-legal studies emerged and through which socio-legal scholars—or the socio-legal “movement,” as it has been termed—stay connected. Other journals that publish theoretical or empirical research on law and society include Kritische Justiz, Rechtstheorie, Demokratie und Recht Blogs, such as Rechtswirklichkeit, have become important sites for the dissemination of socio-legal scholarship. Coutin, and White Meeusen, for instance, studied addresses delivered by presidents of the US Law and Society Association (LSA) and LSA meeting calls They argue that these “demonstrate how the boundaries of the field are established and contested.”. Observational research, a well-established strategy to study the performance of organizational settings, can be used to gather data about sites of socio-legal studies It requires that the process of observation is recorded through field notes, which serve as a—necessarily selective—representation of what occurred.. SCHWARTZMAN, ETHNOGRAPHY IN ORGANIZATIONS (1995); see ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: STUDYING THE COMPLEXITIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE (Sierk Ybema et al eds., 2009). 30Sharyn Roach Anleu & Kathy Mack, Law and Sociology, in ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIO-LEGAL THEORY AND METHODS, supra note 4, at 150. 31Id. at 151
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