The 2020s are a decade defined by existential uncertainty. Reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic and the global rise of authoritarianism, people from all walks of life are struggling to find their footing in a shapeshifting new collective reality. Social scientists and other scholars who study the law face a unique challenge in this regard.
“We’re living in a world where you can’t just assume, in the classic law and society tradition, that there are exogenous forces that impinge upon the practice of law and that make things happen in certain ways, and ‘maybe we can fix it!’” explains Bill Maurer, the Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the Law and Society Review’s new General Editors. “There has always been this ameliorative gesture in a lot of law and society scholarship to ‘fix the law.’ But we’re in a world now where we don’t even know what law is, or what it’s becoming. We don’t know about its ideological or material durability going forward.”
“That’s really one of the big questions for us right now…as scholars and people in the world,” he continues. “What does the law and society movement need to become to match the moment that we’re in?”
This is a heavy, overwhelming question—but you wouldn’t know it from the overall tone of the conversation I had with them in February, which was characterized by the type of teasing joviality that only appears among good friends. Professor Maurer and his two new co-editors, Justin Richland and Lee Cabatingan, have a long, dynamic history. Professor Cabatingan met Professor Maurer as a prospective graduate student at UC Irvine, where he was poised to be her advisor. When she pivoted and decided to attend the University of Chicago instead, Professor Richland served on her doctoral committee. The three eventually reunited at UC Irvine, where Professor Richland serves as the Chair of the Anthropology Department and Professor Cabatingan teaches criminology, law and society, and anthropology.
“We have known each other for a long time,” says Professor Maurer, “each of us as pairs and as the three of us in different kinds of contexts, in different roles, in different relationships, including power relationships…We have a very high degree of trust in one another as people, but also trust in each other’s work and trust in each other’s judgement as scholars.”
It is little wonder, then, that, when applying for the LSR General Editor position, Professor Richland asked Professors Maurer and Cabatingan to join him.
“I think I went to each one of them and said, ‘Would you do this with me, PLEASE?’” he recalls. “I think I begged.”
“It was begging,” Professor Maurer confirmed.
“What I really appreciate about working with these two is that none of us thinks that we know everything,” chimes in Professor Cabatingan. “It makes it a very open space for me to be able to speak out and pretend I know something, because we understand that we all have learning to do, especially when it comes to this role.”
In some ways, Professor Cabatingan has the most to learn about the position, which constitutes her first experience with editorial leadership. Professors Richland and Maurer are more seasoned in this regard.
“I’ve definitely got the seasoning,” Professor Maurer says.
“The grey beard, does this suggest seasoning?” Professor Richland asks. “It should.”
Professor Richland is a former Books Review Editor for the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, as well as a former co-Editor-in-Chief of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) with one of his mentors, John M. Conley. He is currently on the editorial board of a book series, The Anthropology of Language, through Oxford University Press. Professor Maurer also was a co-Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR alongside former LSA President, the late Sally Engle Merry. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy, an interdisciplinary journal featuring everyone from sociologists to communications scholars, as well as an editorial board member for a book series through Princeton University Press, Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology.
“I thought it was kind of cute when you guys were talking about how Bill worked with Sally Merry, Justin worked with John Conley, and I’m like, ‘You two are my Sally Merry and John Conley!’” says Professor Cabatingan. “Fifteen years from now I’m going to be like, ‘I worked with the most respected law and society scholars, they took me under their wing.’ That’s who I’ll get to say I worked with.”
Perhaps another reason for the relaxed tone of the conversation was that, as anthropologists, the three professors are used to, in the words of Professor Maurer, “approaching empirical settings as other worlds.” As one of the founding disciplines of law and society, anthropology’s theories, perspectives, and commitments are threaded all throughout sociolegal scholarship. In recent decades, however, anthropology has found itself increasingly peripheral to the field, with journals like the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) and PoLAR hosting increasingly specialized conversations about colonial legacies, epistemological authority, and the ability to produce knowledge.
These conversations are important, but Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan are intent on fostering broader, cross-disciplinary discourse.
“We’ve always been invested in the conversations taking place in the law and society space, and we are hoping to enrich and deepen and broaden them,” Professor Maurer explains, going on to affirm their commitment to more “traditional” law and society work.
“We certainly will have a home for that scholarship, but also hope to push in directions…that speak to the world we’re living in right now,” Professor Maurer explains. “Through working with other colleagues in sociology, history, law, whatever other field people are coming to the journal from, we can enrich the conversation about this world that we are inhabiting and where it might go, which may also shift again what the law and society movement is all about.”
In order to push law and society into the future, Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan are prepared to navigate the field’s flagship journal into unchartered waters.
“How is it [law] presenting itself in the world, and what are the novel ways in which it is doing so—law as a phenomenon, law as a set of relations, as a force—how are the ways in which we’ve taken that for granted in the past coming up for reconsideration right now in ways that are, frankly, unnerving?” says Professor Richland. “The fact that we have to ask these questions in the first place means this is a prime moment for LSR to expand its reach and open up the conversation.”
Armed with tools and advice from the previous General Editors, Ashley Rubin, Katharina Heyer, and their colleague at UC Irvine, Shauhin Talesh, as well as their Managing Editor, Ryan Cadrette; their Editorial Assistant, Isabel Patten; and their new Associate Editors, Kirsten Carlson, Kate Henne, Michael Ralph, and Sara Wakefield, the team is exploring strategies for doing just that: “opening up the tent” without alienating current readers. By revamping LSR’s social media presence and building out its digital platform with short form essays, commentary, and interviews, they hope to drive more readership to the journal.
“It goes along with actually rethinking what a journal is and what a journal is for,” Professor Maurer says. “Kate pointed out to us…’You have to remember that people don’t read journal articles anymore, or even abstracts. They read quick AI summaries of journal articles.’”
LSR’s newest Book Review Editors, Melissa Crouch (University of New South Wales) and Amy Cohen (Temple University), are asking themselves a similar question: What role can and should book reviews play in the field of law and society moving forward?
“It’s becoming more important to be able to say something substantive about a book in your own voice, with your own stamp, rather than a book review being primarily a summary of the book itself,” Professor Crouch explains, alluding to the fact that large language models are now able to produce thematic book summaries.
To that end, Professors Cohen and Crouch, who succeed former Book Review Editors Jothie Rajah, Eve Lester, and Anna Reosti, are working to integrate longer form essays into LSR’s book review section. The newer format will allow writers to demonstrate their grasp of the field, generate their own ideas in conversation with the works they are covering, and describe their reading experiences.
“We need to feature how a book lands for a reader,” Professor Cohen says. “What does it feel like to read? What connections are you having? How do you link this to a field? The things that a human reader really does with a book is what I hope we can showcase with a longer form essay.”
“I think when great books come out, reviewers are good at saying, ‘This is the kind of research this book could lead to, this is the next thing that could follow on from this book, this is what the field should be doing as a result of this book,” Professor Crouch continues. “That’s one of the things that great books do, they contribute new directions and innovations to the field that lead to other kinds of scholarship.”
In order to demystify the process of book reviews, Professors Crouch and Cohen have published updated guidelines and advice for book authors, publishers and potential reviewers here.
The General Editors and Book Review Editors are also tweaking the review process to ensure that scholars from a wide range of fields and regions are well-represented. Professors Maurer, Richland, and Cabatingan have assembled a team of associate editors from the worlds of political science, history, criminology, sociology, legal doctrine, and regulatory studies. Each associate editor fields articles in their respective areas of expertise, either recommending them for rejection or soliciting peer reviewers for pieces they think should move forward.
“You’re getting lots of levels of review guaranteed at the very outset,” Professor Richland says. “You’re getting lots of eyes, lots of different perspectives. Not just our three, or our six [bespectacled] eyes, but people who are well-versed in the area that is represented.”
Professors Crouch and Cohen are making an intentional effort to ensure that the book review section accurately reflects law and society’s diversity. They are still accepting direct pitches from publishers, authors, and prospective reviewers, but they are also proactively looking for books from authors based in the Global South and other less-represented regions.
“Amy obviously has…connections in the US, but also globally, and she has done work in India. I’ve been mostly based in Australia, but also in other parts of the world, particularly Asia,” Professor Crouch explains. “We hope to bring together those combined and overlapping networks to feature really interesting books that are coming out.”
LSR’s new editors have a lot on their plate, but their biggest challenge, surprisingly enough, is logistical: finding peer reviewers.
With another journal he is involved in, Professor Maurer says, “I literally will just ask three people, and all three will do it, or I’ll ask three and two will do it.” But with LSR, “… in some instances we’re asking ten, and getting one, and then going back and trying to come up with other people to ask.”
This is a major issue, and a tricky one. Peer review, which Professor Richland calls “the lifeblood of academic publishing,” functions on a sort of gift economy basis. While academic publishers make money distributing peer-reviewed articles, scholars themselves perform this critical labor anonymously and for free, with no real incentives other than passion for the work. Like mentorship and letter-writing, peer review doesn’t factor into merit consideration for individual career trajectories, and as economic stability becomes increasingly elusive and the academic job market somehow manages to become even more competitive, scholars are forced to adopt a pragmatic mindset when assessing their priorities.
“Most academics wear multiple hats,” Professor Richland explains. “I think people are feeling stretched in ways that they haven’t felt before.”
“For many people too, especially academics just starting their career, they will have a very practical question: ‘Okay, you’re telling me for tenure I have to publish peer reviewed journal articles, I have to get my book out or whatever, I’m expected to contribute professional service, and that includes things like peer reviewing. But tell me: how many does that mean? Does that mean one a year? Two a year?’” Professor Maurer says. “Whereas for me, even now with serving as co-Editor in Chief of the journal, if I get a request from another journal to do a review and the manuscript looks interesting and good, I say yes. I want to know what’s going on in the field, I want to read some exciting stuff. I imagine that maybe I can be useful—part of the whole aspect in which this is a vocation, not a job. But for many people, more and more people, it is also a job.”
“It’s a throwback to a different time and different understanding of what it means to be in a profession that I think is still laudable, but increasingly difficult to accomplish,” says Professor Richland.
To the three professors’ relief and appreciation, LSR’s Editorial Board members have committed to reviewing two to three manuscripts per person for the journal. An email has also gone out to LSA members, asking them to register with ScholarOne, the journal’s submission management system, for potential peer review assignments.
“It’s a little bit of a plea to the membership,” says Professor Maurer. “Please please please, the journal is only going to live to the extent to which we can have a rigorous process of peer review, and we can’t get it without our membership and our readership.”
Professors Crouch and Cohen have a similar request.
“Authors want their books reviewed, but it can be hard sometimes to get people to review books. So we want to encourage members to see this as part of their service to the field. We particularly encourage those in an emeritus role to impart their perspective on the field through a book review. Alternatively, early career scholars who are keen to start engaging with the field should think about proposing a book review to us,” says Professor Crouch.
LSR has been a pillar of the sociolegal studies world for decades now. To celebrate the journal’s 60th anniversary this year, the editors plan to share online content highlighting the most read, downloaded, and cited articles in LSR history, with corresponding interviews. They are also hosting a panel at the 2026 Annual Meeting, where they will introduce the new Associate Editors, share updates about the submission and review process, and share their vision for the journal’s future as a home for innovative thought.
“When I have students, I want to get to that point where I can see their faces melting off at what I’m telling them, because I’ve made them think differently about the world,” says Professor Richland. “I hope we can capture that vibe for the journal.”
Professor Maurer agrees. “I think the thing that’s hard is translating that into the pages of the journal. You get the submissions you get, you do the editorial work you can do. But hopefully, even just by reading this interview, people will feel a little bit of freedom for this kind of exploration, and we will get submissions that reflect that.”
Some scholars will be hesitant to submit anything but their most finished, polished work to a journal with LSR’s stature and reputation. The editors, though, are confident that they can help submitters present fresh ideas in a way that maintains the journal’s high standard of quality.
“There is one outside-the-box article that Bill put some notes on, saying, ‘Take a look at this one, it’s interesting,’” says Professor Cabatingan. “And I looked at it and said, ‘This is fascinating! What do we do with it now?’”
“We want to encourage people to send those types of articles, because we will help you get them across the finish line, if they really do ignite interest and explore some new topic from a law and society perspective. Those are really interesting articles for us to read and discuss, and for other people hopefully to read as well.”
“I really would love that spark of wondering,” Professor Richland says. “Because we are living in a moment where we should be wondering.”