Current LSR Issue

What does it mean to be a citizen? To be equal in birth and stature as others born in the same land? How does law answer these questions and are the answers satisfying? Have the goalposts of citizenship shifted such that old, exlusionary notions of citizenship based on wealth, race, and sex now dangerously infect our society? These questions and this Essay are derived from the 2025 Presidential Address given at the Law and Society annual meeting.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Scholars trained in disciplines like anthropology, history, law, political science, and sociology helped to give rise to the field of law and society over the past two generations. What theories does law and society offer those disciplines in return, and are scholars in those fields looking back to law and society? To answer these questions, this article, which introduces a symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Law & Society Review, brings together scholarship across disciplines to share the possible future influence of law and society on the disciplines. This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon law and society’s contributions over the past two generations and to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.

Although “law” is the primary common ground in law and society scholarship, many of us are trained in other, complementary academic disciplines, which give us unique perspectives into the interaction between law and society. How can we employ these perspectives in ways that help us effectively speak to our various disciplinary audiences? In this short essay, I draw from my own experiences navigating professional life in the academy to explore how my engagement with law and society scholarship has helped me navigate scholarly life between law and anthropology.

This essay examines how Law and Society approaches have transformed historical analysis by reconceptualizing law as constitutive of social reality rather than as an isolated formal system. Tracing this methodological revolution from 1960s American legal history through scholars like J. Willard Hurst and Lawrence Friedman to 1990s legal consciousness studies by Patricia Ewick, Susan Silbey and Sally Engle Merry, the essay demonstrates how these frameworks reveal law as lived experience operating through documentary practices and administrative procedures rather than overt coercion. Through examples from British colonial Singapore and Hong Kong, the analysis shows how legal mechanisms normalized authority, how marginalized subjects strategically navigated plural legal systems and how legal transformations eventually became invisible within naturalized landscapes. Law and Society approaches provide historians with three crucial innovations: revealing agency through strategic legal engagement, reconceptualizing power as operating through capillary networks of documentation, and reframing historical transformation as gradual reconfiguration of legal categories that denaturalizes what appears inevitable.

What does conducting law and society scholarship have anything to do with wilting blooms? In this essay, Lynette J. Chua makes the connection between the two through her reminder to law and society scholars to study the taken-for-granted, an intellectual project that has become all the more urgent as politicians and activists contest concepts such as citizenship, gender, territories, religion and rights. She also calls upon fellow law and society scholars to be humble – for the significance and impact of our research, like flowers, could come and go with the seasons.

The relationship between political science and sociolegal scholarship is, at it’s best, a constitutive one. This essay argues that the two fields of study have taken turns illuminating important aspects of law, politics, and social life – responding, in turn, to the theoretical and empirical findings of each other. Law and Society scholarship, in particular, presses political scientists to rethink their foundational assumptions about the rule of law, the power of institutions, and the meaning of judicial decision-making and processes. Some of this rethinking may result, as we posited on the panel which gave rise to this work, in a fruitful “undisciplining” of the field, and re-imagining of the political.

This essay compares and contrasts the disciplines of sociology and law and society. I then outline how sociology can enrich law and society with stronger theory-building and better linkages of theoretical frameworks to empirical data. I next consider how law and society can enrich sociology, including by encouraging sociologists to take seriously law’s constitutive nature and to engage more directly with their work’s normative implications. Throughout, I draw primarily on research on U.S. immigration enforcement, which is both my area of study and a site of rich cross-pollination between the two fields.