Writing the editorial preface to the fiftieth anniversary volume of the & Society Review is a humbling exercise. For us, this 2016 Volume is the beginning of our third and last year as editors. We will soon pass the torch on to the next editorial team, Jeannine Bell (Indiana), Susan Sterett (Virginia Tech), and Margot Young (British Columbia). We, of course, stand on the shoulders of law and society giants who preceded us as editors. Their names speak to the history of the & Society Association, to what it stands for, and how it has evolved. In reverse chronological order: Jon Goldberg-Hiller and David T. Johnson, the first team of editors in the journal's history, Carroll Seron, Herbert M. Kritzer, Joseph Sanders, Susan S. Silbey,WilliamM.O'Barr,FrankMunger,ShariSeidmanDiamond, Robert L. (Bob) Kidder, Richard O. Lempert, Joel B. Grossman, Richard L. (Rick) Abel, Marc Galanter, Samuel (Sam) Krislov, and, at the beginning of it all, Richard D. (Red) Schwartz.The biggest change facing the journal (and perhaps the most important benefit) throughout its five decades has been the massive growth in the number of papers authors submit. This growth is due to the increase in law and society scholarship, the solidification of the journal's reputation, and the general strengthening of thematic fields vis-a^-vis traditional disciplines. Just in the past two decades, the number of submissions increased from 120 per year in the late 1990s to 140 in the early 2000s, and then to 170 in the late 2000s and 270 in the early 2010s. Today our submissions are well above 300. While submissions have skyrocketed, space, the allotted number of pages, has been relatively stable. This means that the acceptance rate has dropped to below 10 percent. Gratefully, other law and society journals have appeared on the scene, domestically and internationally, and we recently commented on the ecology of outlets when we included, in issue 3 of Volume 49, a note by the editors of Droit et Societe^ on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of that journal. For the Review, growth and the necessary selectivity have consequences for the way in which the journal is run and, ultimately, for its content. It is not by chance that we are the second editor team in a row and that we will be followed by a third team. Processing an ever growing number of manuscripts indeed becomes a team effort.At the 2014 Annual LSA meetings, the fiftieth anniversary meetings of the & Society Association, Malcolm Feeley organized a panel in which he brought together some of the earliest and some of the most recent editors of the Review.He invited them to compare the early and late volumes in the journal's history. Such exercise easily reveals substantial change. Newsletter elements, part of the first volumes, disappeared early on. The journal also lost the guideline quality that accompanied the early search for an identity. Invited by the editors, Rick Lempert, for example, wrote a contribution on Research Design for Legal Impact Studies and Carl Auerbach reflected on Legal Tasks for Sociologists (both 1966). Explicit and spirited exchange also waned, like that between Jerry Skolnick and Auerbach in the same 1966 issue. And, while early contributions reflected great intellectual sophistication, illustrated by Aaron Cicourel's article Kinship, Family, and Divorce in Comparative Family Law (1967) among many, a special issue dedicated to a purely descriptive account of a socio-legal issue would no longer be conceivable today. A 1967 issue offered such a set of accounts on the, albeit important, topic of school segregation in a series of cities. Indeed, methodological sophistication has increased over the years. At the same time, today's work may be less groundbreaking, some approaching a state of normal science and all reflecting a higher degree of thematic, theoretical, and methodological specialization. Challenges to integration across specialties are one consequence. …
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Apr 10, 2022
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