What Socio-Legal Scholars Should Do When There Is Too Much Law to Study

Abstract

Twenty-one years ago, as the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies was taking form, I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation in sociology of law. It was a time of intellectual optimism, of hope for collective development of theoretically and empirically grounded understanding of how legal systems really worked. Each new empirical study cast a beam of light into a little-known, often humble province of law's empire, illuminating relationships between the law in action and the law on the books. The learning curve slanted upward sharply. These days, on the other hand, I feel a certain frustration. In the last twenty-one years, socio-legal studies have accomplished a great deal. But we are failing, I feel, to keep up with developments in the legal systems that surround us. The problem is this: in contemporary democracies, positive law, the law on the books, proliferates extremely rapidly so rapidly that it confounds our attempts to find out, in any systematic way, what is actually going on. Like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, we seem to run faster and faster only to keep from falling further behind. The ecological outlook in the Amazon may be troubled, but the number of species in the legal rainforest keeps multiplying.