Professors across disciplines and career stages share the possible future influence of law and society on their fields. Scholars trained in Anthropology, History, Law, Political Science, and Sociology all helped to give birth to and raise the field of Law & Society. What theories does Law & Society offer those fields in return? This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon our field’s contributions across the past two generations – and to consider what Law & Society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.
Watch the video below for remarks from University of California, Santa Cruz Professor Mark Fathi Massoud, who chaired the panel, as well as Asad Asad (Stanford University), Lynette Chua (National University of Singapore), Renee Cramer (Dickinson College), Jeffrey Omari (Gonzaga University), Nurfadzilah Yahaya (Yale University), and Emily Zackin (Johns Hopkins University).
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mark Massoud
Good morning, can everyone hear me okay? I’m Mark Massoud, Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz. I’m glad to be here for this Law and Society Association thematic panel on Building the Disciplines with Law and Society. Thanks for being here today.
I’d love to get a sense of the people in the audience. How many of you are in law, like law is your primary field? Raise your hand in law, like you’re in a law school, law faculty, graduate student studying law? How many of you are in the social sciences, political science, economics? Awesome. And then how many of you in the humanities, like history?
Okay, so it seems like most people who are here are in law or social sciences and a few in the humanities, and I think that’s great, that’s fabulous for our purposes. I organized this panel because I think our field, our interdisciplinary field and our association, are at an inflection point. We’ve been around for about two generations, 60 or so years, and I think this is a moment for us to step back, take stock of where this field has been over the past two generations, and where this field might be headed over the next generation, maybe about the next 30 years or so. I’ve been in law and society for the past 20 years, and as I think back over the past 60 years, one thing becomes clear. And that is the various disciplines, and here I’m speaking of law, of course, but also anthropology, history, clinical science, sociology, and others, these disciplines gave birth to law and society as a field, especially here in the United States. It was scholars who were trained in these areas, these disciplinary areas who really raised up the field of law and society as the space that we know of today.And as we enter this third generation of scholarship through about 2050, I think it’s time for us to take stock, as I said before, of the theories that we offer as a field, as an interdisciplinary field. And the theories that we offer back to the fields that gave birth to this field.
So I invited a set of scholars across these disciplines, across career stages, to come here today, to share the current and possible future influence of law and society on their fields. I ask them to consider the following sets of questions:
First, is your discipline, history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and so on?
Is your discipline looking to law and society? Is your field even looking to law and society? If it is looking to law and society, what’s it looking for? What’s law and society providing, historically, to your discipline?
If your field is not looking to law and society–what we do in this conference and what we do in our work is kind of adjacent to the fields that many of us work in–why not? Why aren’t our fields looking to law and society?
And a related inquiry is this: Does law and society provide a new way of theorizing important ideas in the disciplines? A new way of thinking through, for instance in sociology, thinking through social problems. In anthropology, does law and society offer a new way for anthropologists to think about ethnographic methods, to think about human relationships with one another as societies form, as societies collapse, and so on?
And more broadly, the final question I asked our speakers to consider is, what do you think law and society can, or even should, offer to your fields, going into the next generation of scholarship, the next 20 to 30 years through 2050, that can help push the needle forward in their fields, in all of your fields?
And I came to this panel not only because I care about law and society–as I said, I’ve been in this field for about 20 years–but because I also care about disciplines, and I work with a lot of people in a lot of places who care about their disciplines as well. And I wonder, “What can we offer to those disciplines?”
So let me introduce each speaker. They have about seven minutes each, and I’ll ask one or two provocations after they all speak, and then we’ll open it up for discussion so that all of you can join us in this inquiry today. I’ll introduce the panelists by their name and their field or their or their discipline or disciplinary area. I’ll let them do any further introductions in terms of integrating their own research or ideas into the question of what law and society offers to their field. Suffice it to say, I’ve tried my best to represent, to the extent I can, the panoply of cognate fields that we in law and society, I think, are poised to change, or maybe are already changing. So we’ll proceed in alphabetical order by last name.
First, to my far right, to your left, is Asad Asad. Asad is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.
To my far left is Lynette Chua. Lynette is a legal scholar and Professor and Vice-Dean of Research at the Faculty of Law at National University Singapore.
To my immediate right, Renee Kramer. Renee is a political scientist, currently Provost and Dean at Dickinson College, so Renee will be thinking bigger across disciplines.
To Renee’s right is Jeffrey Omari, who goes by Omari. Omari is trained as an anthropologist and he is Assistant Professor of Law at Gonzaga University.
To my immediate left is Nurfadzilah Yahaya. Nurfadzilah is a historian and assistant professor of history at Yale University.
And to Nurfadzilah’s left is Emily Zackin. Emily is a political scientist who studies American politics and is an Associate Professor of American politics at Johns Hopkins University.
There’s one more panelist who is unable to join us, Susan Hirsch. Some of you may know Susan Hirsch, she’s an anthropologist, a long time scholar in the field of law and society. She’s a professor at George Mason University. And Susan is the program officer for law and science at the National Science Foundation. You should know that Susan wanted to be here today. Actually the NSF told her she could no longer travel to conferences. She’s engaged in a national struggle to support law and society research in this country. And on behalf of all of us here, I thank Susan for her dedicated service to our interdisciplinary field and also to foundational scientific research in this country. And I’m sorry she couldn’t be here today.
With that, thank you all of you for being here, thank you to our panelists, and I will turn it over to Asad.
Asad Asad
Good morning everybody. I’m Asad. It’s good to see you all here. Thanks for organizing us. It’s great to be in conversation with everybody and thank you all for turning out for what I think is going to be just a really fun panel.
I’m tasked with starting the conversation about what sociology contributes to the law and society tradition. So I’ll talk a little bit about what I think of as the three key vantage points that I think sociology brings. And then I’ll close with a little bit of commentary on what I think sociology might stand to gain from law and society.
At its core, sociology asks us to think relationally. We are trained to attend to interactions. The everyday ways that people make meaning, assert power and navigate systems. But we’re also attuned to how those interactions are structured by institutions, education, healthcare, the labor market, and so on. And these institutions themselves are nested in broader contexts. You have to think about neighborhoods, counties, states, and even time periods. So this layered attention to interactions, institutions, and contexts, I would argue, is central to how I understand what sociology brings to law and society. It enables us to reevaluate legal power, not as something that just exists, out there, codified in statutes or enforced in courtrooms, but as something that is filtered through relationships. It’s experienced as ordinary people try to apply for a job, enroll a child in school, or access the hospital. These are interactions that occur in specific institutional settings, and they carry different stakes, depending on who is involved and what relationships they represent. So a parent and a school administrator interacting is one thing, a worker and an employer, a patient and a provider, or an assistant professor and his many senior colleagues. And these interactions don’t float freely. They happen in context. And context can be social, political, historical, and it shapes what’s possible or desirable in any given interaction. So a conversation between a Latino immigrant and a teacher in San Diego, California is likely to play out differently than the same conversation in Montgomery, Alabama. And these differences matter. They point to the situated nature of law’s power, how it is mediated, enacted, and resisted in particular times and places.
So what does all this mean for law as a society scholarship, especially as it relates to sociology? One answer, I think, is that we need to take interactions more seriously. We already know that perceptions of legality matter, but it’s not just how people perceive the law in some abstracted sense. It’s how they observe legal power at work in their interactions, how they measure it through everyday experiences, and how these experiences accumulate into broader understandings of what the law is, and what it’s for, and perhaps more importantly who it’s for.
This is a point I try to develop in my own research. In my book Engage and Evade, I examine how undocumented immigrants in the United States navigate institutions under the threat of legal sanction. I show that their orientations to the law, whether they engage with institutions like schools and hospitals or avoid them, are shaped by how they interpret the risks of surveillance in those spaces. But those interactions are not fixed. They vary across cities and states, they depend on local immigration enforcement practices, public discourse, and social networks, and these contextual factors–some very visible, others more sinister, harder to detect–influence what people feel like, or influence whether people feel like the law is protective, threatening, or something that they might even be able to ignore strategically. And that matters for how we understand law and society.
So this brings me to a second point. I think we need to think more systematically about institutions and their relationship to law and society theory. In sociology, we often treat institutions as the backdrop for social life, places where norms are enforced and identities are formed. But law and society scholarship, I think, would push us to ask, “What kinds of legal consciousness or shapes in these institutions? How do those institutions enable or constrain legal mobilization? And how do they produce variation in people’s experiences of legality across a number of identity markers, race, ethnicity, class, gender, what have you?”
And finally, I think we need better and more diverse measures of context. So legal scholars, of course, often look to statutes and policies. And sociologists, for their part, might think about these same measures at the county level, at the state level. As an immigration scholar, there’s no shortage of papers that look at state-level measures of immigration policies across the United States and correlates that to any number of outcomes. But we’re only beginning to explore more dynamic ways of capturing how people experience context.
So what do I mean here? Just because a law is on the books, doesn’t mean that that law is salient to the people who are subject to it. And so in some of my recent work, I’ve been using Google Trends data to understand how local information environments shape immigrant health outcomes. So for example, whether mothers in counties with high search risk from immigration enforcement are more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies.
Now these digital traces are not perfect, but they offer new avenues for measuring context as it is lived and experienced in ways disconnected from just a policy roll out or some new enforcement action. It helps us capture sort of the everyday interactional processes through which politicians, for example, might stoke the fear of deportation, even though policies may or may not have changed.
And so to wrap up, I think the question that started this panel was, “Are these disciplines looking to law and society?” And I think in sociology, we could and should do more. Law and society offers us a way to rethink some of sociology’s core concepts: how we theorize institutions, how we understand social problems, and how we conceptualize power and resistance. But perhaps, I think, more importantly, law and society offers us a sensibility. One that is interdisciplinary, one that is empirically-grounded, and one that is theoretically ambitious. It encourages us, not just to see the law as a system of rules, but as a terrain of struggle, some that applies more to others than some, and a site of meaning-making, and a structure of inequality, whether in the United States or in some other world region, like in Israel or Palestine, for example.
For those of us in sociology, that’s a reminder worth carrying forward. So thank you all very much, and I look forward to the conversation.
Lynette Chua
Good morning. Unlike many of you at the round table, I only have written notes, so hopefully I can read what I wrote.
I think many of the points that my colleagues on this panel are the ones that I also agree with as somebody who was trained in Berkeley, in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, and then now in the law school, in Asia, the National University of Singapore. So I thought I probably should focus on some points that are more unique, or more characteristic of somebody who’s actually based in the law school versus social sciences.
So first thing–I thought I would preface what I wanted to say about being in the law school and what law and society is, because these two ideas, or social groups of academic scholars, are actually quite different depending on where you go to, or where you are. I always found it very interesting, I’ve known Mark since 2008. His reference point for law and society’s origin is always 1960, the 1960s, for 60 years or so. That’s the origin of American law and society, and that’s the tradition that I was trained in as well. But when I returned to Asia and started to do my own law and society research and started my career there, I realized that actually, law and society origins vary around the world. The oldest law and society association was actually founded in 1947 in Japan. Indonesia, India, and other countries have different origins of law and society, and they are not necessarily social scientists who started to study law using social science methods. Rather, many of them were actually law professors who were unhappy with the limited offerings, the limited intellectual possibilities of doing law doctrinally or through jurisprudence, and they started to look to the social sciences.
So I think the difficulty of answering Mark’s question, his mandate, his missive to us, “How can law and society influence or shape the disciplines?” That’s one question itself that has to be contextualized, I think. And of course, law schools vary around the world, even in the US, if you are in a tier one versus a third tier law school, their sensibility and their receptiveness to law and society will vary. And that’s also the same around the world as well. So whatever I say, I just wanted to preface that so that we can think about it in a more contextualized way.
So I would divide my comments, in my effort to answer Mark’s questions, into two parts. One is actually in response to his question, “How can law and society shape the discipline that you come from?” which in my case, I suppose, is law? But I also want to flip it around, “how can law and society learn from the discipline in which that scholar is currently situated?” in my case being law? I thought I would focus on two points. In Part A, “What can law and society do to shape the study of law or legal scholarship?”
I think that being where I am, I’ve seen how empirical work within the legal academy in various parts of Asia, including where I am, has taken on a higher frequency among the younger scholars, the young are open to doing empirical work. And if you want to look past the most recent 15 years, that’s maybe the early 2000s, it was virtually unheard of that somebody in my legal academy would be doing empirical work. I don’t want to say that this is entirely law and society’s influence, but definitely I can see how the presence of somebody like me who has managed to do quite well in terms of doing empirical work and still getting tenure and moving on with her career, they have seen that it’s possible to do long-term or major projects using sustained field work to inform the arguments.
But I think that one of the pitfalls that I see, perhaps, legal scholars who are not trained as social scientists or are not trained as law and society scholars run into is the second point that I want to say, that it’s about theory-building. We as law and society scholars and sociologists and anthropologists have been trained in our research career to build theory, whether it’s a lower level or a higher level kind of theorizing, theorizing from the data. But younger scholars in the legal academy who are using empirical work, they think that that’s doing law and society, but that’s just one the part of the puzzle. The other important bit of the puzzle is what you do with the data, right? It’s not just saying, “Okay, I categorized the data into type A, B and C, and this is my data analysis.” I think that next step needs to be theory-building, let’s say engaging scholarship on immigration, engaging scholarship on constitutional law or identity, and I think that’s something that, as a law and society scholar or from the adjacent disciplines, can influence our younger colleagues in the legal academy, who are venturing out to do empirical work.
So these are the two points and a third point is that, I think, as a law and society scholar, I can see how younger scholars can be influenced to think about the limits of law because as the Vice Dean of research, I also run a doctoral workshop for my law students, for PhD students in the law school, and every week somebody presents a chapter from their dissertation, and almost everyone wants to change to law, whether its banking law, consumer law, because there’s always something wrong that they need to fix. And I’m a law and society scholar, I’m thinking “Wait a minute, have you done empirical work to figure out if that is how the law actually operates?” So I think that is something that, with the interest and the venturing out to do empirical work, that perhaps law and society can influence younger generations of legal scholars in the academy to think about the unintended consequences sometimes of the law and legal reform.
I think I’m running out of time, so I’m going to move on to talk about Part B of my response,
which is to flip it around. I think that there is something that law and society can learn from regular folks who do legal scholarship. I see many people here situated in the law school so I thought it’s worthwhile to talk about it. I’ve been in job talks where this person is a law and society scholar or sometimes a legal historian. They present the paper, and then the dreaded question comes up, “But what you just said is very descriptive,” the dreaded “D” word. I think many of you have come across that in the law. But as we all know, people here in the audience who have done empirical work, it’s not just describing anything, we’ve gone through a whole lot of processing, organizing, and analyzing the data and presenting it in a certain way, but to the law professor, you’re just telling me a bunch of facts.
So I think, so I struggle with this and I don’t have an answer. How do I help these other scholars describe their amazing data analysis but not run into this dreaded “D” word and just die at the job talk? And I think the way to do that is to, sometimes it’s this word play, not say, “I’m going to describe what I find,” but rather “this is what I’ve analyzed and what I found.” But at a higher level, it’s also to push beyond “These are my findings, categories A, B, C, and D,” but to engage in conversation and theory-building, even if it’s just micro-level kind of theory building about your data. What can we learn from this specific case study or country study about the topic of immigration or citizenship? I think that might help us or our younger colleagues from the law school avoid the dreaded “D” word as I call it.
The second one, and this is not law and society learning from law, but learning from the interactions with regular legal scholars. Second point that I want to make is, I think it’s useful for me to have also been trained in a basic legal education–I have a basic law degree, LLB; in the US the basic law degree is a JD–I’m simply more precise about exactly which legal provision I’m talking about or what I’m critiquing. I realize, and this is something that I do as a matter of just habit, that it’s not always what other scholars do or scholars in the social sciences. For instance I went to present a paper in geography in my university and then the first comment that a colleague from geography said “Wow, you’re very precise about the legal provision, you’re spelling out exactly what’s wrong with it,” and my response is that actually that’s exactly what you should be doing. If you are going to be critiquing about the law being hegemonic, or being discriminatory, we better know how exactly it works through the administrative process or through the court process, rather than, you know, sometimes we see articles where they talk about “This law is discriminatory,” but exactly how does it work? And this is where I think legal training actually helps. At what stage; is it at the point of plea bargaining, or is it at the point where the case is being argued in the court proceedings? I think being precise about the provisions and the regulations that you want to critique is also actually very helpful for law and society scholars, and that’s something I think, strangely enough, is what legal education can train in law and society scholars.
I’ll stop there and I’m happy to answer any questions later. Thank you.
Renee Cramer
Lynette and I think similarly, so…we’ll hope. Hi, thank you all for being here. I have to take my glasses off so I can see paper and I won’t be able to see you.
So I asked myself the question, “How can law and society or sociolegal scholarship contribute to the disciplines I come from and reside in, and how do those disciplines potentially contribute to law and society?” And I will say, when Mark and I talked about this panel a year ago in Denver, just kind of “This would be a fun thing to do, a good thing,” I was in a very different space. And I think, and I mean that in terms of the present contemporary political moment. And my reflections as I was thinking about being here are a lot around that space that we currently reside in, in the United States.
So I’m a political scientist. And I have barely ever said that out loud. I really see myself as a constitutive sociolegal scholar. I found law and society in 2001, at the Miami meeting in the early 2000s, as a refuge from political science, where I ended up in a PhD program at NYU that was very focused on game theory, which I found to be incredibly decontextualizing and alienating, and understandings of democracy that were predicted based on GDP data, and a whole bunch of spreadsheets, and I was one of maybe two or three people in my cohort who talked to people for their degree. So I’m trained primarily as a comparitivist, but my secondary fields are political theory and public law, and I focus on the United States using a comparative lens.
So the other day, January, I was at the Southern Political Science Association meetings. I was invited there to speak on a panel of women in higher ed leadership who are also political scientists. But I went to the keynote because a friend of mine was the president of the time, Elizabeth Oldmixon, and she gave this really beautiful talk about the loss of her faith in the field of American political science given what she is seeing unfolding. And she did this beautiful kind of, I would have called it law and humanities work, talking about a need to forget what she had learned in grad school about the resiliency of institutions, the durability of the constitution, the presence of a rule of law, and how process will save us. And I raised my hand I felt almost bad doing it but I said, “Gosh Elizabeth, you should come to law and society because we have known this for 20 to 30 years.”
The foundation, for me, of a sociolegal understanding is that rights are contingent on acting upon them. That the rule of law only exists with a democratic body willing to enforce it, and in fact that the rule of law is malleable, it’s not it’s not the kind of thing that we can unreflectingly call “good.”
I feel as though, at this moment in political science, some of our colleagues might need to hear from us that we have come through that moment in our discipline 10 to 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and made it through. That the feeling of groundlessness that some folks, at least in the sub-discipline of American political science, are feeling related to institutional norms is one that we will, disciplinarily, live through. And I think that the way law and society can further help those people is to say, one of the better ways to approach things is comparative.
In Elizabeth’s keynote, she said, “I wonder if part of why I’m feeling this keen loss is that deep within me, deep within my training, was an American exceptionalism that I had not yet interrogated.” And I think that a law and society tradition does interrogate that understanding of American exceptionalism.
So I’m also the editor of the journal Law and Policy, and I really really appreciate what Lynette and Asad have said about the theory-building that we do, those of us in this room who are law and society scholars. I often get papers from political scientists who do work on courts, and from sociologists who are also criminologists, and there’s this feeling I have where I’m just like.” If you could nudge it towards a theory, it would really help. And by that I mean, if you could think in an integrated, holistic, and deeply contextual way about the super cool data that you’re showing me, it would help. And I don’t think this is about scholars being junior, and I don’t think it’s a lack of imagination on their part, I think it’s a lack of a discipline, sociology or political science, caring about those kinds of deeply contextual connecting things. The dreaded “D” word, “descriptive,” my work has been called descriptive. I say it is interpretive. But I also had to learn, I mean I’ve been in this field for a very long time, and I had to listen to my advisors and boosters talk about my work in that way so that I could say, “I do constitutive sociological scholarship with an interpretive method.” That’s the kind of language that I think we gain at law and society because we’re able to telescope out.
So that’s the disciplinary perspective I want to bring, but in the last six, five minutes, I want to talk a little bit about the way I’m using law and society scholarship to navigate my current life. And I think it will reflect back to people in this room about where the discipline can go. I’m hopeful.
So I am a dean and provost at a small top 50 liberal arts college in the United States, not currently on the list of colleges that are under attack right now, I’m not at Smith I’m not at Wesleyan, I’m not at Harvard. Our endowment is under a billion, thank goodness. We don’t rely–it’s the only time we’ve ever been happy not to have a huge endowment–and we don’t rely significantly on federal funds. We get about two million dollars, one point eight in federal funding every year. Most of our research is funded by philanthropy, thank goodness.
Every day, though, I am dealing with what this administration is doing to higher ed. I’m very very lucky, my boss, my president is a former federal judge. He’s a republican, Tom Ridge appointed in Pennsylvania, and speaks with great authority about, he said on CNN the other day, “We don’t bow down to tyrants. The principle of academic freedom is that government cannot tell us what to teach or how to teach it.”
He is a staunch defender of what we do, and he lets me do my job. My job is to defend academic freedom, to make sure my faculty are safe, and I mean that literally. We have one faculty member who’s going through the green card process. She is Palestinian, she writes on Palestine and black power, she has family in Ukraine. We have taken down where her office is located so that if they come–when–with an administrative warrant, they have to go to legal counsel to find her. Those kinds of things. We have students who were involved in the encampment. We had a 10-day encampment on our campus, and it was handled well, the students were brilliant, but we gave them advice about how to navigate when they are going to be traveling abroad, and how to wipe their social media and having to do that.
We also have lost an NEH, but we were able to get philanthropic funding to backstop for a faculty member, first gen faculty member, writing on black power in Detroit. We were able to find a donor to subsidize what she lost with the NEH. But we haven’t been able to fill in when we lose our student vista positions that actually help our local community. And that’s the part where law and society scholarship feels important to me, because one of the reasons higher ed is being attacked is that the lack of trust in higher ed by the general public comes for good reason, and helps push a narrative that “all of these elite people” are, all we do is navel gaze and leach off the economy, and hold a bunch of money in reserve, and don’t help our communities at all. So one of the things I’m trying consistently to do is help solidify and reaffirm our place in our region as democratic practice.
I want to just close by saying one of the reasons this feels important is for a law and society reason. Law and society as a discipline, which to me is a set of practices, emphasizes interconnection and optimism. I love law and society because it is always on the lookout for the counterhegemonic, anti-institution, undercutting of power ways through things like the present moment. So I’m trying to build communities of scholars and communities of leaders, where we engage in that kind of counterhegemonic, anti-institutional set of practices while firmly entrenched at the head of an institution. Which is hard to do.
Jeffrey Omari
Good morning everyone, my name is Jeffrey Omari.
In his book [Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society by Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud], Mark defines “positionality” as “the disclosure of how an author’s racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influences their pedagogy and research methods.” To become a better translator, I had to learn to appreciate and employ my positionality as both a law professor and an anthropologist.
Interestingly for me, without understanding the theoretical implications of positionality, I had actually written about the topic many years prior in my dissertation. While in grad school, I conducted fieldwork in Brazil, studying issues of digital rights and governance in that country. And my field sites were Rio’s favelas, where I got to know residents who were affected by the government’s digital policies, and in a law school with the professors who helped draft those same digital policies. But it was my positionality as an African-American lawyer and researcher that guided my translation between those two field sites. My blackness helped me relate to the favela residents, who were primarily Afro-Brasilians, while my status as an American lawyer provided credibility in the law school. Through employing this positionality, I was able to navigate those disparate environments and speak to the audiences in each.
Now as a sociolegal scholar who teaches at a law school, I draw from my training as both a lawyer and an anthropologist in my research and pedagogy. And engaging with this community of law and society scholars has aided me in effectively appreciating and applying its theories, like the power of positionality, to my own lived experiences. And it is through leveraging our lived experiences, whether they be self-identifications or professional backgrounds, to the communities that we engage with, that can help us become more effective translators.
For me that looks like employing theoretical frameworks from law and society, like the power of positionality, as a bridge between my anthropological and doctrinal worlds. Thank you.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Good morning everyone.
My discipline of history, particularly in the area of Islamic law, imperial law, and legal history generally, has undergone a significant methodological shift towards law and society approaches in recent decades, in recognition of the fact that law is never separate from economic relations, cultural formations, or expressions of violence; they are integral to how it has operated.
Since the 1960s, the field has moved beyond treating law as an isolated formal system to recognizing its embeddedness within social contexts. Law and society scholars such as Patricia Ewik and Susan Silbey’s focus on legal consciousness contributed to the broader cultural turn in historical scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the 1990s, especially at Princeton University, where Clifford Geerrtz influenced historians such as Robert Dunton and Anthony Zeeman Davis.
We seek methodological tools to understand how power operates through seemingly neutral legal mechanisms while bearing in mind that this “neutrality” remains a powerful facade. In colonial legal history, we look for frameworks that help us comprehend how colonial authority was maintained, not just through visible force, but through documentary practices, administrative procedures, and legal categorizations. The anthropologist Sally Merry, whose work on legal pluralism is particularly trenchant, the coexistence of multiple legal systems within a single social field, has provided historians with crucial analytical frameworks. Other scholars, such as Elizabeth Mertz, Carol Greenhouse, and Lyla Molluga continue to show how societies use law to manage social transformation across the world. Law is a lived experience. So this concept has helped historians understand how indigenous legal systems, colonial law, religious law, and customary practices operated simultaneously in historical context.
Building on this evolution, law and society approaches provide a fundamentally different way of theorizing historical change, one that understands law as constituting reality itself, rather than merely reflecting or shaping society. After all, law establishes the parameters of visibility and articulation, determining what can be recognized and expressed. Through these mechanisms, law creates worlds.
In a colonial context, law functions, not as an abstract important system, but as an adaptive medium that both enables and constrains action. It configures environments while being reconfigured by them. Law’s effectiveness tends, not primarily from over force, but from this capacity to normalize itself and render its operations unremarkable. Consider the difference between explicit and implicit forms of colonial power. For my second book project, I look at the history of land reclamation in the British Empire, where legal jurisdictions are made concrete. A surveyor claiming a shoreline as crown for sure appears benign compared to military presence, just as an official document extending authority across oceanic species seems less coercive than armed force. This apparent neutrality enhanced the effectiveness of legal mechanisms as procedural rather than coercive.
A law as society approach makes explicit how procedural elements such as administrative systems serve as conduits for authority in themselves. A case from Singapore in 1875, which I explore in my first book, illustrates this dynamic. A small community of Arab merchants, comprising only 50 families in a colony of over 97,000 residents, petitioned the British colonial government regarding Islamic marriage and divorce practices. These religiously conservative merchants were concerned that local religious officials were granting their wives divorces during their travels away from their wives. The response is not worthy. The British colonial administration, typically reluctant to intervene in religious matters, established a marriage ordinance in 1818? 1880? centralizing Islamic religious affairs, recording all marriages and divorces. This was accomplished without violence or mass mobilization, but through strategic engagement with colonial legal structures.
Consider also imperial land reclamation projects. Contemporary Hong Kong’s author friend with his modern infrastructure obscured legal processes that transformed coastal zones into fixed properties. Invisible are the Chinese merchants who invested in reclamation projects but were excluded from decision-making regarding the resulting land that emerged. The foreshore area between high and low-tides became contested legal territory due to its ambiguous status across the world. In Hong Kong, engineering projects created new land, while judicial decisions established new property rights since the 1830s, when it became a crown colony. The process went beyond creating real estate. It reconfigured sovereign space and established new ontological categories.
What makes this legal transformation significant is their eventual invisibility in the landscape. Singapore’s current waterfront bears no evident traces of the legal context that determines its use and access. So it’s quite like an extreme example.
This is why law and society approaches offer a new way of theorizing in historical scholarship. They de-naturalize what appears given, in a way sensitizing us to change in power relations. They reveal how western legal concepts such as property and sovereignty presented as universal phenomena were specific historical impositions that encountered alternatives and introduced alternative legal epistemologies. They challenge a notion that lets law stand outside society rather than constitute it.
The theoretical implications are substantial. Law doesn’t immediately govern identities, places, and temporalities; it creates them. How is it that these approaches provide new theoretical frameworks for historical analysis? In at least three ways. First, they shift our understanding of historical agency by revealing how marginalized subjects strategically navigated legal systems. Second, they reconceptualize power as operating through capital networks of documentation rather than solely through centralized authority. Third, they reframe how we understand historical transformation itself, not as sudden ruptures, but as gradual reconfigurations of legal categories and relationships that sometimes creep up on us surreptitiously. The law and society approach provides an alternative mapping of power, one that traces how authority operates through documentation, how resistance emerges within plural systems, and so on.
In conclusion, law and society approaches transform our discipline by changing how we perceive historical change itself, by examining how legal mechanisms constitute our reality. These approaches modify the epistemological foundations upon which we recognize transformation. Our scholarly responsibility is to examine the appearance of inevitability and reveal the continuity of what seems to be fixed. Thank you.
Emily Zackin
I want to thank Mark very much for organizing this fascinating panel. I thank my fellow panelists for a really interesting morning. I think many of the themes you described you will hear echoed in my talk as well. I’m very honored to be here.
I wanted this morning to try out an argument, and you should know this was before I knew we were going to be recorded. I’m still going to try it. But the insights of law and society were and should remain a kind of north star for scholars of public law, this is the study of law within political science, as they or we respond to the rise of behaviorism within political science. And in some ways this is the mirror image of the picture in law schools, I think. So rather than empirical work being kind of marginal and needing a defense, in political science it’s absolutely central. And not just generally empirical work, but actually a set of empirical questions defined in particular by causal questions about what drives political behavior. So political science in the, say, 1980s and 90s, becomes really centered on a set of questions about, “Why are political actors doing what they do? What causes political behavior?”
And when I was in graduate school in the 2000s, the big debate among those who studied law and courts was about whether law constrained judges or whether their behavior was all just a way of achieving particular policy outcomes, the outcomes that they preferred. Could you study the Supreme Court, in other words, the way you studied congressional behavior or voter behavior, by figuring out what these people really wanted, their policy preferences, and then arraying them on a continuum from conservative to liberal? Could this explain their rulings? And it turned out you could. Republican appointees do make more conservative rulings in general than democratic ones. And then the judicial behavior literature went on to explore the strategies that justices use with one another and with respect to lower courts to maximize their policy preferences. To get the law as close as possible to the outcomes that people judges seem to want.
But once we reach this point, of course, law falls away almost entirely. At best, it amounts to a set of weak norms that determine exactly how justices do what they were planning to do anyway, and at worst it’s window dressing, a legitimating veil drawn in front of the real politics of the court.
How is it, then, that people could continue to study law within a political science department? And here, I think, is where the central insights of law and society saved us. The idea that law is not just a set of words you use to justify things after the fact, but does itself structure and justify our views of the world prior. Law is more than just outputs from courts–it’s another kind of clear, obvious insight from law and society–but something that allowed political scientists to start asking a set of new questions. Not, “Well, why did this justice rule in this way?” but rather, “What role is the court playing in its larger political environment? What is it doing for the political regimes that generate and rely on it? What is it doing for the litigants that look to it? And how, in turn, is it shaped by the larger political world?”
This is, of course, a way of de-centering the Supreme Court, a classic exhortation in law and society. A recognition that there is a much broader politics of law than what’s going on in this one judicial body. That the official legal system, organized in a clear hierarchy with the Supreme Court on top, operates in the midst of a crowded legal space in which, and I borrow my framework from Sally Engle Merry’s work on legal pluralism, many systems of ordering and making sense of the world all vie for authority.
Once we recognize there are lots of other sites of lawmaking, we in the world of political science are free to study that. We can study administrative courts, regulatory agencies, street-level bureaucrats, and we can study the way that people make law and legal meaning without ever appealing to the Supreme Court at all. But we can also study the work of recognizeably political bodies that aren’t part of the government. Work of the NAACP, the ACLU, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the Federalist Society, I think, falls into this category too. These groups have shaped the meaning of our law, and are obviously political. Separately, you can study the way the creation of norms has been central to the working of our political system, so here I’m thinking of the work of my own advisor Keith Whittington, who wrote a book about the rise in judicial supremacy, “Why is it that we think the Supreme Court ought to have the final word on the meaning of the Constitution?” This was a sociolegal process that happened over time, and it’s critical to understanding our politics.
So it’s not only do I think de-centering the court saves the study of law within political science departments, but the second important thing that I think the law and society tradition has done for us is that it lets us understand the mechanisms through which law and politics relate to one another. Let me give you two examples here. One is Michael McCann’s book, Rights at Work, just a classic, and I think many of you probably know it was a classic, in the field of political science, one that’s been central to my own thinking. McCann looked at the pay equity movement of the 1970 s of 1980s, and he showed that legal strategies, or law, played an important role, litigation played an important role. Not because of the big wins or policy changes that courts handed to the movement, but because of the way that litigating itself helped to mobilize and energize that motion.
I want to end for a second now talking about my own new project, which is very much influenced by this question McCann asks, “How is it that law helps fuel movements?” And my new project is about what happens when the Supreme Court repudiates a constitutional claim or vision. When it says, “That whole idea, we just don’t see that here. We reject it wholesale.” Now on one account, we might think “Well, the Supreme Court has the final word, it closes the door.” This is what actually you hear a lot of political scientists say, “The Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of constitutional meaning, so it can say yes or no.”
We in the law and society tradition know, of course, that that can’t be true. The Supreme Court actually has quite limited power to kill off the constitutional visions with which it disagrees. And then my question is, “Well, how is it that people keep those constitutional visions alive?” And in answering this question, I want to combine a de-centering of federal courts, and I do that by looking at states. (I’m a federalism person.) So not just by looking at state courts, though those, but also by looking at their legislatures and constitutions. And by then asking kind of classic law and society questions about legal consciousness, about the way that those rival lawmaking institutions at the state-level shape our sense, or at least a movement’s sense, of who it is, of their relations to others, of right and wrong, and what is legitimate. I think we need the tools of law and society to answer these questions. We need to understand–I promise this was in my notes before–law as a constitutive sociolegal process. A set of legitimating narratives, symbols, and an institution that structures relationships. Law and society already has a big set of theories about how this process of meaning-making works. My own research has emphasized this with state-level institutions, (my new stuff on resistance is less developed) and I wanted to give you an example from my book I just published on debtors.
What happens is that the US Supreme Court in the 19th century says again and again, “States cannot relieve debtors, it violates the Contracts Clause of the US Constitution. Its totally unconstitutional.” And it’s pretty clear that that is the original meaning of the contracts clause. States aren’t allowed to just kind of cancel debts. And yet debtors across the 19th century, in moments of economic crisis, show up and say, “We don’t care. We don’t think it means that,” and they push their state legislatures into relieving debts, which the state legislatures do–actually in some of their debates, and newspapers pick this up, they’re pretty clear that this is probably not going to withstand Supreme Court review, and they just say, “Well, this is what we think it means, this is what our constituents want,” and they do this again and again and again until finally, during the Great Depression, the Supreme Court is the one that capitulates. It says, “Okay, I guess some kinds of relief are fine,” and the Contracts Clause changes meaning.
So I don’t know if my discipline as a whole is looking to law and society as a way to move forward, but I do think there is increasing interest in the politics of resistance. This debtor example is a little example of state-level, bottom-up resistance to top-down explanations of what the constitution means. And in studying the politics of resistance, my own experience suggests that understanding the way that law legitimates and mobilizes movements will be very valuable to this endeavor. Thanks.
Mark Massoud
I want to thank the six panelists for that rich and remarkable set of comments about what law and society offers, and indeed what the disciplines themselves continue to offer to law and society as a field. So this kind of interplay between what the disciplines are offering to law and society and what law and society is offering back to the disciplines as we think about the next generation of sociological scholarship.
I want to ask the panelists a couple of questions as we get started, and then we have plenty of time for discussion, so I encourage all of you who are here to think through what questions you would like to ask the panelists, maybe from your own disciplinary perspective or bridging together various disciplines whose hats you might wear depending on where you sit at this point in your careers.
So the first question I have is for whoever wants to think about this for the panelists, what are the challenges you see? The panelists were quite hopeful, I think rightfully, about the spaces where law and society can intervene and has intervened in their fields, what law and society has offered to history, to political science, I think Emily at the end spoke very well about the idea of a politics of resistance. That many of us in law and society have long been interested in resistance and this has helped in some ways this and the study of not just the Supreme Court but other courts has helped shape or keep the study of law alive in political science and law and society really filled that gap in political science. So I want to ask, what are some of the challenges that law and society faces as it moves forward? I think Renee you touched on this a little bit in terms of contemporary political challenges at least in this country, I think Lynette touched on this and thinking about the challenges that law and society faces as a global field, I know Lynette has been very active in the development of the Asian Journal of Law and Society, the Asian Law and Society Association, Lynette’s a past president of that. Is it important that our field does this? Is this an opportunity for our field? Is it is a fragmentation of the field? And I know the Law and Society Association has been very keen on building up law and society in other contexts, in Brazil, in African contexts, in East Asian and South Asian contexts. Is this a fragmentation of our field, or is this an opportunity?
Along the lines of that question is, what fields should law and society be looking to? It could be that you’re a sociologist and you say, “You know what? I think law and society really should be thinking more about history,” or you’re a historian, you think law and society needs to be taking economics really more seriously in a way that we haven’t in the past, we kind of let go of law and economics research quite a long time ago and that kind of moved into its own field. But we have Nurfadzilah here saying, “You know what? economic relations are kind of the foundation of how we think about and study a lot of the historical documents, including historical legal documents, that we encounter in archives.” So that’s the first kind of set of questions around the challenges that this field faces in trying to make inroads in the fields that you all work in.
The second set of questions is, one thing that I appreciate about law and society is, at least when it began in the United States, and I was forgetting the important critique that Lynette mentioned, the fact that it did begin much earlier, and Lynette and I have written about this in the past together, that it did begin much earlier in other parts of the world. So I don’t want to lose that context, but focusing for a moment in terms of how it began here in this country, really a lot of people saw law and society, not just as a scholarly field, but many people started referring to it as a movement. Law and society was an association, it was a field, but it also was, for a lot of people, a movement. And I wonder if one of the things law and society is offering is, not just a movement for all of us to try and make the world a better place, which many of our state leaders are trying to stop us from doing these days, it seems, but it’s a chance for us in our disciplines to be maybe less disciplined. And that’s one of the contributions I’m learning from this panel, is that in seeing law and society as a movement and in working within and also without, or outside of or beyond disciplinary spaces, we’re encouraging our colleagues to lift up the fences that block our disciplines from one another and either push them down, break them, lift them and move them to a new spot, and maybe that undisciplining is one of the key contributions of law and society as I heard it from all of these fields.
Omari talked about the importance of translation, and translation, I think in one way, means sitting on those fences between anthropology and law, between sociology and law, between history and law. Being able to sit on the fence, look one way towards anthropology, look another way towards law. To be able to speak law and speak anthropology at the same time, so that people in both of those areas can take the work seriously. And that is part of the movement, that we are–it’s not just a kind of movement for justice, which I think is in many ways a part of where law and society came from, but it’s also a kind of scholarly movement. If we are going to move toward justice, we need to start at home, by breaking down the fences between our disciplines so that we can think about how to answer the tough questions about how to establish a more robust rule of law, how to establish a more real economic and social justice in the places we live and work from, and come from, and so on.
So I’ll leave that there. I’ll allow the panelists, if people wanted to interject for just maybe a minute or two on anything that I’ve said in terms of trying to wrap up or summarize what came from me from this discussion, and then I’d love, as I said, to open it up to all of you. There are a group of people here on the panel, but all of you are–we are all here among equals, and so I want to hear your perspectives and voices and questions and comments too from your disciplinary perspectives. There’s a reason the universe brought you into this room today, so I want to hear from you as well. But first, let me return it back to the panelists.
Asad Asad
Thanks Mark for those really wonderful questions to start the conversation.
You know, I think one of the things that I grapple with as both a peer reviewer of academic journals but also as someone who receives many reviews from the same peer review journals is, I think one of the big challenges is that law and society, or at least “the law” as people understand it, tends to be somewhat naturalized, sort of as background noise, in a lot of pure sociology journals, And so it’s really tough, for example, to convince people that the idea that laws exist is not what law and society is about. Actually law and society goes a little bit deeper than that to sort of structure how we relate, how people relate to the law, and not just in a way that sort of describes how laws structure people’s lives, but really how people resist the law. So on the one hand, I think law tends to be sort of treated as this background variable in a lot of sociological work, and so it’s tough sometimes to foreground that importance because people just sort of say, “Okay, its the law,” but let’s move beyond that and think about what that means.
And I think the other challenge that I see is actually that some of the big ideas from law and society have actually filtered their way into sociology, “legal consciousness” being one example. But the phrase “legal consciousness,” as it’s applied in the most basic way in some of the sociology peer reviews I received, is that they understand legal consciousness to be awareness of the law, which as all of you know, that is incorrect. Yet, the phrase itself is so sticky in some ways that people love to use it, and I think there’s this wonderful Annual Review of Law and Social Science where Susan Silbey talks about the uses and the abuses of the term “legal consciousness.” And so I somewhat see that as a challenge of law and society, that as our ideas become more mainstream in the disciplines, they also risk co-optation, for lack of a better term.
And then I’ll just say one brief point on the movement element. You know, I think I like this idea of being “undisciplined.” I think that Omari’s comments about, “You write more like a lawyer,” or “You write more like an anthropologist,” I think maybe all of us have received those wonderful accusations previously in our respective disciplines, and I take that as a badge of honor, as I’m sure you do too. But I would say the other challenge with that is sort of how do you make yourself legible to a disciplined evaluator? Whether again that’s a from a career standpoint, right? So who is it that can speak to your candidacy as a scholar who is, I’ll just use my own phrase, who is an immigration scholar, but an immigration scholar who is active in law and society? And so although there are many immigration scholars who are conscious of the law, they are not all law and society scholars, right? There’s this sort of tension I think that we deal with from a career standpoint, how do you make yourself legible to the right audiences when it comes time for things like career milestones, tenure, promotion, other kinds of evaluations? And that’s sort of one of the big risks, I’d say from a vantage point of being undisciplined, that suddenly you become illegible, in some ways, to perhaps the mainstream discipline. I’m not saying this is happening, or it has happened a lot, but it is a risk that I think that many of us might contend with.
Jeffrey Omari
I think I’d like to respond to Mark’s first question, which was, “What are the challenges that law and society faces as they move forward?”
For me, I see law and society as a community of scholars that allows us to be ourselves, our professional selves. Whether you are an anthropologist, or a sociologist, or a lawyer, it allows this very interdisciplinary perspective, which in essence provides us with multiple scholarly identities.
And I think that’s really important, because to have these interdisciplinary perspectives–as I suggested, it’s about our positionality. But our professional positionalities are informed by our personal positionalities. And in this climate, as we all know, our personal positionalities, identifications, are under attack. And so, I see law and society as a way of, again, being our professional selves, and in essence, as a way and a means of pushing back against some of the attacks that many of our friends and colleagues and allies are feeling right now.
Renee Cramer
So I would like to say something about the movement question, and I have two vignettes and a theory, and I think they can be brief.
One is, one of the ways that I’m dealing with the present moment is meeting regularly with groups of deans via zoom. And one of those sets of deans are all law and society scholars, among them Julie Novkov, Aaron Lawrence, Jon Gould. And we had Song Richardson, who is law and society, former law dean, former college president, we had her guest with us on one zoom call, and she said, “Look! If it’s all going to break, which it will, we have to imagine, starting now, how to build something better.”
The other vignette is, I’ve got a wonderful group of faculty who have passed a resolution asking me to instigate a mutual defense fund among small colleges. I would have been that faculty member ten years ago before I understood how how insurance and finance work. Like I can’t do that. I literally cannot do that. I can do five of the seven things they’re asking me for, I can’t do those two. And in conversation, one of my favorite faculty members said, “Look–in extraordinary times we have to do extraordinary things. We have to imagine a different world.”
Both of those moments, the thing that flashed in my mind was Boa Santos’s piece, “Law: A Map of Misreading,” which is one of my favorite things to teach and one of my favorite pieces of sociolegal scholarship, where he writes about these different approaches that we could take to understanding law. He says, “We could approach it like it’s a carnival. We could approach it like we’re on a frontier. We could approach it through a baroque sensibility.” And when I used to teach that, my students used to get all excited, they would be like, “Yes, we can actually form some new–we’re at a moment of inflection and we could do it differently.” And the last few times I taught it, during the first Trump presidency, they were like, “Clearly we have chosen a path and its neoliberalism, and we’re not going to go to a frontier, and we’re not going to have a carnival.” And it got sad. But I think that maybe potentially things will break, at least within the higher ed space, so profoundly in the next five years, that it is indeed the job of people like me who hold this understanding, a sociolegal understanding, and a position of power, to imagine– maybe not a frontier because I don’t like that that metaphor, but a carnival. And I’m hopeful that that becomes a bit of a piece of a movement that law and society is a part of.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
So I think that law and society–history is already anticipating itself when it comes to legal history in that it borrows so copiously from other disciplines. So it could be a model moving forward for other disciplines to do likewise.
I think that in terms of–so I’m going to speak in two scales, one is micro history and the other is infrastructure. So for micro history, you know, we, unlike other disciplines, I think, we lean into description. We revel in it, we love it. And I think that we are due for a return to micro history, which has gone out of fashion since the early 90s. In Natalie Zemon Davis’s work, especially The Return of Martin Guerre, she really goes deep into the French historical record, transcripts in a French village in medieval times, and we really see how a woman was willing to recognize a man who was not ***spoiler alert*** a man who was not her husband as her husband. So, drama aside, right, it tells us about gender relations, village relations, village power structures, hierarchies, agricultural units within the village, and so on and so forth. So it’s such a rich story based only on one episode in one year across five years in a French village.
The other thing that history can contribute and also has been influenced by law and society is the notion, the phenomenon of infrastructure. Which could only be seen most accurately from a higher level, from a lens that is wide. And in there, it is time also for us as historians to lean into the humanities even more. In that, you know, we should look at how things such as land and territory are actually constituted. Because as we lean into law and society, we become more legalistic and become also more institutional, but there is something to be said about leaning away from that field and looking at how, ontologically, these things are devised, and thought of, and considered by people historically. You know, people like Bruno Latour, [unclear], and Jane Bennett, you know, histories of materialism. Tiffany Lethabo King, Robin Wall Kimmerer, you know, with their post-colonial, anti-colonial ethos, would also help in the study of law and society.
Emily Zackin
I guess one thing I’ve been reflecting on is the the difference between the terms “interdisciplinary” and “undisciplined,” because, Mark, when you said “undisciplined” because I mentor graduate students, I freaked out. I was like “No! Discipline!” at the valence of those terms.
So I think “interdisciplinary” is a nice, safe word that describes much of what we all in this panel have been doing today, which is to say, “There’s my discipline and the insights from this interdisciplinary project and we can pull from disciplines but that the disciplines don’t dissolve.” And Mark, your invocation of the idea of “undisciplining” ourselves is really much more radical, I think like, not “reach across the boundaries and borrow and learn” but just “break them down.” And I think one of the reasons to move in that direction is to say that the boundaries themselves are keeping us from talking and seeing the really important stuff. Certainly in political science, at least in American politics, we’ve been having that conversation since Trump’s first term. Like we didn’t see this coming. A lot of the theories in American politics, like “parties will move to the middle to appeal to the median voters,” its like, “How do we teach this anymore?”
And so you could think, “Well, what we’ve got to do is unblinker ourselves and undiscipline.” And then I was trying to articulate why I was so upset about that notion. And one reason is surely this idea of being legible to the gatekeepers. That’s a real risk. But I think there’s some intellectual reason not to give up on disciplines too, which is that they ask different kinds of questions. They value different kinds of insights. And that very plurality may be really valuable.
So I often read a lot of the work of legal historians that draw on it, but I recognize that I’m going to, in the end, value a different kind of insight than the legal historian–even when we work on the same stuff and value one another’s work very highly, I’m taking something different, I’m making a different kind of argument, and I think keeping that around is probably good for the creation of knowledge.
Lynette Chua
I’m going to try to answer Mark’s two questions. The first one about the challenges of law and society moving forward. Because I see law and society developments, not as one massive movement, but as different streams around the world, I hesitate to talk about a singular challenge. But I think at the individual level though, and that sort of feeds into the bigger various streams of development of law and society, for law and society scholars based in law schools, the challenge will be that when you are a young scholar coming in, you could struggle to maintain that law and society identity. I think Omari talked a little bit about that. Because you’ve got to teach something that contributes to the core curriculum. You end up teaching employment law and constitutional law and end up publishing in the journals that the law school recognizes. I think that’s sort of a challenge at the micro level for individuals. And of course at the aggregate, that affects the law and society development in the jurisdiction that you are working in.
The other question that I am interested in answering is the one about how the Law and Society Association could influence or move law and society forward around the world. I think about this as somebody who is wearing the hat of Global Coordinator for the Law and Society Association currently. I hesitate to say that Law and Society Association, by that we mean mainly the US-based scholarly community sort of bringing their ideas about doing law and society scholarship and building it around the world, I hesitate to do that. But in fact I want to sort of latch on to what some of you have spoken about at the moment here. You know when I started out doing law and society scholarship, and I don’t work on the US, I’ve been told that, “You’re working on authoritarianism or some small jurisdiction around authoritarianism, this doesn’t look like the other case,” right? Whereas the majority of people I engage with in the community that I was trained in, mainly in the US with law and society scholars here, are not working on that other case. But now I think this, perhaps, is a moment for our American colleagues working on the US to think about the so-called “other cases” that have been about law and authoritarianism, how that can inform understandings of legal mobilization.
Mark Massoud
Thank you to the panelists for those responses. Let me now open it up to folks in the audience. I’d love to gather maybe two or three or four comments and then send it back to the panelists and we might be able to do a couple of rounds with them. So I saw a hand in the back and then up here in the front.
Audience Member 1
Hi, my name is Ari. I own a business that is a consulting firm, so I came here as an independent researcher, but also an adjunct in sociology of law. And thank you all for a wonderful setup for more research in various areas, I’m sure many people would agree me with me.
So I’m having here a part-time presentation of my first class of sociology of law, and actually it’s titled “Law and Society.” And while I was giving that class, I understood that some of the students are from various disciplines and interests. And incidentally, I covered every area; I was very excited about the sociologists who studied because I was a sociology major before I went to law school.
So I kind of talked about sociology, and in my narrative I explained how sociology was the backdrop of all of the others, in this order. And I don’t know if you intended to do that, but you arranged the panel in such a way that you are all sandwiched between sociology and law. I would take you as a pickle right there, and the tomatoes, and all of that, beautiful concept you got here. I hope this will be every year and that I will be a panelist next year.
In that, I kind of just picked up from the last speaker, and while I was explaining that I have a conceptual model here, where on one of the slides I asked the students about how culture–these are anthropology students–how culture interferes with social perspectives, and also control interferes how the courts come in to say they’re the final. And then we go into Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson and all of that, and [unclear], and it would interest you to know how the students came up with various perspectives and presented all of your disciplines–geography was one of them–one of the students came up with issues of geography, and it was interesting to see how ultimately it was brought back to the fact that sociology, if I would quote myself here, is like the left ventricle. And for those of us who don’t know science, like me, I had to do a lot of research, the left ventricle is that part of the heart that beats and connects blood. Without the left ventricle you are dead. So this is just a tip for the rest of you, tell your wife she’s your left ventricle, she would do anything. But sociology’s like the left ventricle, right? And then law helps come in to give the icing on the cake.
And answering the question on theory, I offered a theory in my dissertation, its about socialism, and I tried to marry sociology and law. I would offer my theory as a solution to that question.
Mark Massoud
Thank you. And then we’ll move up here to the front? Yeah.
Audience Member 2
So I’m Leslie Frances from the University of Utah, and I’m from a field not on the panel. I’m both a law professor and a philosophy professor. And I want to thank the panel, it was a fabulous panel. It helped me understand why I’m here. And I think it was Renee’s comments that maybe came the closest to this.
There’s a movement in political philosophy that’s been going for a long time called “non-ideal theory” or “partial compliance theory.” There’s a whole wide range of ways of thinking about it and doing it that I identify with, and what this panel helped me understand was how you can both theorize but do so in a way that’s contextual, historical, and attuned to the world of injustice where you are. So thanks.
Audience Member 3
Okay so my name is Mercy. I’m a PhD in law at [unclear] university. So for my major I’m focused on disability law because I myself am a disabled person. So I’m wrestling with what Professor Chua said. When we were an undergraduate everyone was so ambitious, to say, “Oh, I want to change the law, and then once we change the law society will be better.” So when I was an undergraduate in China, I majored in law and I also thought that way. But when I came to the U.S. I became curious about, “Well even if we have disability laws in China, why did I never ask about reasonable accommodations?” I never, I just used my prosthetic limb, no matter how difficult it was, I just climbed staircases.
And once I came to the States, I realized that the disability resource center would ask me, “Mercy, do you need accessible buses? Then we can pick you up and drop you off at the teaching building.” An then there’s everywhere, as you can see in Chicago and in this building, you can see the accessibility, so people with wheelchairs are able to enter this building.
So that’s how I started to think about, “Is this a matter of law, or is this a matter of how society understands the disability identity and the meaning of being disabled?” So that’s how I started my law and society journey, because in my law school, we don’t have anyone who’s working on that. So I just read all these articles by myself, and I started to explore how different disabled people used a law or didn’t use a law. It turns out, it doesn’t matter how the law is just written in the books because so many scholars will say, “Oh, once we change the disability law in this way, that way, that’s the thing we’re reading about.” But it turns out that disabled students, they don’t really care about law, they don’t even open a book to see what the law is. They just have automatic mechanisms they use to work on their relationships with school authorities and to get the reasonable accommodations they need, because for some of them, the accommodations are healthcare, rent, accessible classrooms–indispensable. So, but my question is–so I explored and I realized they just rely on intense relationships with school authorities to get accommodations. My question, especially for Professor Chua, is how–because my classmates always ask me, “Okay cool, you always find this mechanism then, showing that actually it is nothing about the law, it’s about how they work out relationships to get accommodations. But what’s your contribution to legal studies? What’s your contribution to law? What are your insights, and what is your recommendation for law?”
So I want to know, like Professor Chua and all the wonderful panelists, how to understand these types of questions and how to, I don’t know, contribute to the studies you are working on?
Lynette Chua
I think that your challenge is that most of the time, when you write a legal article, we often see that at the end you are expected to give a list of policy recommendations. But I think that’s quite a standard thing that, you know, PhD students or even undergraduate students, when they write research papers, encounter. I guess there are two ways to deal with this. One is to, you know, go along with it and just give some policy recommendations. But you can use the law and society edge in the sense that, because you have presumably a paper, all the sections of the paper that preceded that had talked about the problems with, you know, legal reform, or the problems with the current law. So you can use that empirical insight to make better policy recommendations than somebody who didn’t do the fieldwork, who imagined that one law needed to be reformed in a certain way. So you can use that as an edge, having done the law and society work.
The other is to push back and say, “Look, my paper is not about what law ought to be, my paper is to tell you and theorize about law is, and what is wrong currently.” And I think that gives you a stronger law and society identity in a sense. So it depends on how you want to navigate that. I tend to do the latter because I don’t like doing policy recommendations. So I think its really up to you, these are two possible options.
Mark Massoud
We have about eight minutes remaining and I think what I’d like to do–there are a lot of hands that are up, and I want to make sure I privilege the audience because the panelists have had so much time to speak, and if we have time maybe I’ll come back to the panelists as well. But I know there are a lot of people in the audience who want to get some words in, so I saw one hand here, another here, and then another hand up. So we’ll get those three, and if there’s time we’ll come back to the panelists. But I think, hopefully, the panelists might be willing to stay a few minutes extra for people to approach and have one-on-one conversations as well before the next panel.
Audience Member 4
Thank you. I’m Carl and I work as a law professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and just talking about positionality, in a law school that is mainly a black letter law school, I would say, but has a bit of law and society [unclear] also, my main identity is in the field of interdisciplinary children’s rights studies, childhood studies, that’s where I come from. I want to engage with your question about the movement. I think it’s at the same time a challenge, how a movement is, at the one hand, a movement for social justice, where the origin of law and society lies, but at the same time also this movement towards un-disciplining (I also like the term “post-disciplinarity”) the thought campaigns we work with and the theories as well, so a very slow, long-term one. And of course they relate in the sense that, if you’re busy with the social justice struggles accompanying social movements, then where is the time to work also on the slower work, and how we can think of how this relates?
I think its very contextualized. I understand that in the US today, your social movement is to preserve the thinking space. So that’s about the movement itself to have that space to think through things in the long-term. But the question is also growing that I can see that these two movements, they exist within the sociolegal field, but it’s not always easy to see how they relate because resources and time are limited. So when we go too much to the social movement ourselves for social change, then are we also, do we have enough time also to do the more, I would say, epistemological theory work?
Audience Member 5
I want to pick up on Lynette’s point that maybe American law and society scholars would be more interested in understanding authoritarianism law and movement mobilization by asking. This is a moment globally where there’s an enormous readjustment of political and social reality post-Covid and with the rise of the right. This was a fantastic panel that had enormous insights across disciplines. I’m curious what all of you think are the unexplored questions that we should be looking at at this particular moment in history? (Without having to disclose your next project!) But I’m really interested, because it’s such a diversity of perspectives and so insightful so where should we be looking next given the moment we’re in historically?
Audience Member 6
I’ll try to be really brief. I’m also from a discipline that’s not up there, although we’ve gotten a few little shout outs, geography and the weird history of legal geography. But I think one of the things I take from that is also that this is a home in a way that geography has never been, and that is because of the interdisciplinarity. And it is because of the way that interdisciplinarity and translating it across these disciplines challenges you to think differently. So I guess my question is really, where are you all going from here? Because honestly I think law and society as an international project, movement or not, has this unique potential in this moment that the dominance of American pushiness is maybe getting lifted a bit, and as somewhat said a little earlier we get to see a little life underneath. My hope for this moment is that all of us Americans can take a moment to realize the American exceptionalism that’s baked into almost everything we do and look internationally for next steps. So as a law and society group of scholars, it is both an intellectual project and also bridging that technical legal aspect that actually does have real power with understanding how that functions, right? I guess that’s all to say, are you going to have an edited volume?
Mark Massoud
We have about three minutes remaining, I think I do want to give it back to the panelists, if they’re willing to take 30 seconds each, and then we can end on time, and then whoever has other questions, by all means please come forward at the end. Don’t be shy, please come forward. So why don’t we go in reverse order?
Lynette Chua
To Katie’s point about the movement and what to learn, let me give you a short story. I was sitting in the board meeting of LSA two days ago and, not divulging the why we talked about this, but the question was about censorship. And the very typical reaction is “Oh no, we cannot have censorship,” but my point wasn’t that censorship is good or bad, I think that its about rather “How do you deal with censorship? How do you work around censorship to get to do what you want to do?” And I think that is why people who have studied about terrorism around the world, looking at resistance, have a lot to offer. It’s not just saying we’ve got to take down the censorship, or whatever is the barrier, head on, but also in various ways, including subversion, or compliance on the surface, and so on, so forth. So I found that sort of interaction in the board meeting very interesting. The immediate reaction was, “No, we cannot allow censorship,” but my point was that I know its bad, but how do you handle it? And that’s something that maybe people working in the American law and society field could learn.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
I think that the way forward is actually that legal geography. We should take the physical, natural, geographical world more seriously, materially, as legal historians.
Emily Zackin
I love that answer! I was going to say that I think there is a lot of exciting work in comparative legal studies and Kathryne Young is in the audience whose book I rely on and really enjoy. But this work on rights movements, I think, has been so dominated by American ideas about rights and that it’s been enormously strengthened by looking at rights in a comparative context. I think we should continue in that direction.
Renee Cramer
The thing that I would love to have time to work on is the relationship between the rise of this new type of populism and a distrust of expertise written as bureaucracy. And not like “What’s the legal consciousness of people who don’t like bureaucrats?” but rather something deeper around what has happened to institutions post-New Deal that has alienated folks from them, and how might we rehabilitate an idea of institutions and expertise as important? What would that mean epistemologically? Could that happen through maybe a look at anarchist theory rather than populist theory?
I just want to say about being undisciplined: I love the idea of being undisciplined. Because for me, disciplinarity is a set of practices, and when those practices are so deeply instantiated that we can be boundaryless and playful, then that’s what I would hope for our field moving forward.
Jeffrey Omari
Thank you. Someone, I’m not sure who, asked about research agendas that speak to some of these issues and topics. So I’ll share mine briefly because I think does speak to many of these issues.
Lately, I’ve been using the Anthropocene as a theoretical tool to examine issues of political disinformation, online speech, and democracy, and recently I did it within a domestic context, but my next piece I’m going to explore the same issues, but with an international context. And again, I think that speaks to a lot of the issues that we’re facing at the moment.
Asad Asad
Thanks everybody for all those wonderful questions and I’m super inspired by everyone on this panel. I think for me, to sort of get at the two big questions, the last two questions posed for us: what are the unexplored questions, and how do they relate to the normative movement, perhaps. For me these unexplored questions are also inspired by the balance between theory and the normative. So I mentioned working on a series of articles related to immigration enforcement with particular attention to spatial and temporal contexts, and the reason for that is to capture some of this chatter, not about law or policy, but about misinformation. So there was a report about ICE presence on campus, and that turned out to not be true. But what is the impact of that chatter? How do we deal with that chatter? How do we measure that systematically?
I’m also working to export some of the ideas from my first book, primarily about immigration enforcement and system avoidance to achieve it, with my colleague Mayra Federson, who is a lawyer and a PhD in jurisprudence and international policy from Berkeley, so we’re working to interview South American immigrants and how they become incorporated or not into the labor market, and whether they mobilize rights and protections in the face of restrictive or accommodating laws.
And finally, to Carl’s point, I think my next book is going to look at how immigration advocates understand what it means to change the U.S. immigration system, and how are those perceptions structured within legal and political structures that politicians use to demobilize immigration advocates, or at least to distract them from whatever larger issues they’re trying to confront by saying, “Look! Here’s a new fire to put out! Move away from trying to shut down this immigration detention center.
So yeah. Thanks everybody, I’ll give it back to Mark.
Mark Massoud
The only thing I’d like to say to close is there will be more to come. This won’t be the end of this conversation. So please join me for this moment to thank our panelists. Thank all of you for your time.