Exploring the 'Legal' in Socio-Legal Studies

Socio-legal studies have had an ambivalent relationship with the 'legal' – one of its defining aspects, but at the same time one that the discipline has sought to transcend or even leave behind. While socio-legal studies benefit hugely from the insights, methods and theories of other social science and humanity disciplines, the contributions to Exploring the 'Legal' in Socio-Legal Studies illustrate the value of a focus on the 'legal'.

The chapters in this book combine traditional legal materials and analyses with other ways of engaging empirically with the 'legal'. They illustrate the rich potential of the 'legal' as a site both for theoretical and methodological reflection and for case study analysis.

Taken as a whole, this volume demonstrates that methodological discussion is most helpful when rooted in empirical cases, and that the best case studies also help us to develop our methodologies. Bringing methodology and empirical analysis together offers an opportunity to reflect on socio-legal studies and develop the discipline in productive new directions.

David Cowan is Professor of Law and Policy at the University of Bristol, UK.
 
Daniel Wincott is Blackwell Professor of Law and Society and Head of Cardiff School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, UK.

Exploring the legal; David Cowan and Daniel Wincott
PART I: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
1. Debt, Death, and Redemption: Toward a Soterial-Legal History of the Turner Rebellion; Christopher Tomlins
2. The Concept of Law in Global Societal Constitutionalism; Jirí Pribán
3. Portraying the Legal in Socio-Legal Studies through Legal-Naming Events; Natalie Ohana
4. Sex/Gender Equality: Taking a Break from the Legal to Transform the Social; Sharon Cowan
PART II: CASE STUDIES
5. Fluid Legal Labels and the Circulation of Socio-technical Objects: the Multiple Lives of 'Fake' Medicines; Emilie Cloatre
6. Solar Panels, Home Owners and Leases: the Lease as a Socio-legal Object; Caroline Hunter
7. Bringing the Technical into the Socio-legal: The Metaphors of Law and Legal Scholarship of a 21st Century European Union; Paul James Cardwell and Tamara Hervey
8. Territory and Human Rights: Mandatory Possession Proceedings; David Cowan
9. Legal Technology in an Age of Austerity: Documentation, 'Functional' Incontinence and the Problem of Dignity; Helen Carr
10. Following the Law or Using the Law? Decision Making in Medical Manslaughter; Andrew Sanders and Danielle Griffiths
A Sociolegal Metatheory; Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Afterword; Annelise Riles