It has been an enormous honor for me to serve as president of Law and Society Association (LSA). Nevertheless, like many of my predecessors, I approached challenge of choosing a topic for ritual lunchtime address with a bit of trepidation. It seems that no matter what a president does over two-year term, what most sociolegal colleagues remember is the speech. I heard that over and over, as people queried me about my topic and type of talk I planned. So let me say at start that it is not my inclination in this context, as many colleagues are finishing their desserts and coffee, to tell all of you that we in Association need to be doing something new or different. I have already done lots of pushing and pulling in new directions over last several years in other forums. Instead, I offer some reflections on a prominent intellectual tradition of our scholarship, one that has shaped and expressed changing character of our Association over last 50 years, and one that is inseparable from our modes of public engagement. theme of my remarks today is our intellectual engagement as sociolegal scholars with theme of rights.Perhaps no topic, short of law itself, has been more central to sociolegal legacy of scholarly inquiry than that of rights.Itis worth remembering that Law and Society as an intellectual move- ment and professional association was born in era of U.S. civil rights movement.1 first volume of Law & Society Review was published in 1966, when ink was still drying on 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In fact, first special issue of LSR in 1967 (Vol. 2, no. 1) was on school desegregation in United States.The prevailing mode of inquiry in early decades was gap studies that demonstrated how promises of rights often fall short in implementation as policy or practice (Gould & Barclay 2012). Empirical analysis often aimed to offer reforms that might close gap and make law live up to its promises of rights recognition. Then, in late 1970s, several waves of critical theory-first critical legal studies (Kairys 1998), then critical feminist theory, critical race theory (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado & Stefancic 2001) LatCrit theory (Haney Lopez 1996), and queer theory (Bower 1994; Stychin 1998)-began to interrogate promises of rights in more analyti- cally ambitious ways that questioned emancipatory potential of rights and demonstrated ways that rights conventions often support hierarchy, divert political struggles, and impede as well as advance social justice. Much of this scholarship focused on official case law, but it was soon joined by empirically grounded study and debate focusing on degree to which legal and political mobiliza- tion by rights claiming groups or movements advanced egalitarian social justice or positive social change (Handler 1978; Scheingold 1974). This interest in group-based contestation over rights was paralleled by an explosion of empirical scholarship studying indi- vidual disputing over rights and everyday legal consciousness, which included ample attention to rights consciousness. These currents of scholarship regarding both individual disputing and group politics around rights varied widely in epistemology and method, from positive quantitative (Miller & Sarat 1980-81) to qualitative inquiry, including interpretive ethnographic and interview-based study (Ewick & Silbey 1998; Fleury-Steiner & Nielsen 2006; Merry 1990; Sarat 1990). And most of this scholarship in LSA was undertaken by scholars at U.S. institutions who focused on rights in North American tradition or context.The lessons of this rich scholarly tradition are many and cannot be fully covered here, but I will summarize a few highlights of what I have learned. I will save for end my original title, which I abandoned. Instead, I have chosen to title this reflection The Unbearable Lightness of Rights. …