Table Of ContentExploring the ‘Socio’ of Socio-Legal Studies
Palgrave Macmillan Socio-Legal Studies
Series Editor
David Cowan, Professor of Law and Policy, University of Bristol, UK
Editorial Board
Dame Hazel Genn, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, University College
London, UK
Fiona Haines, Associate Professor, School of Social and Political Science,
University of Melbourne, Australia
Herbert Kritzer, Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Minnesota,
USA
Linda Mulcahy, Professor of Law, London School of Economics and Political
Science, UK
Carl Stychin, Dean and Professor, The City Law School, City University
London, UK
Mariana Valverde, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto, Canada
Sally Wheeler, Professor of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Exploring the ‘Socio’ of
Socio-Legal Studies
Edited by
Dermot Feenan
Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Portsmouth, UK
Selection and editorial matter © Dermot Feenan 2013
Chapters © their individual authors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-33718-3
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First published 2013 by
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To my mother and father
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Contributors x
Part I: Introductory Enquiries: Socio, Social ... Other?
1 Exploring the ‘Socio’ of Socio-Legal Studies 3
Dermot Feenan
2 W hat Makes a Social Science of Law? Doubling the Social
in Socio-Legal Studies 20
Susan S Silbey
3 The Contested Social 37
John Clarke
Part II: Historical and Theoretical Enquiries
4 Law, Ethics and Socio-History: The Case of Freedom 61
Alan Norrie
5 De Lege Ferenda: What is the ‘Socio’ of Legal Reasoning? 85
Panu Minkkinen
6 R eimagining Humanities: Socio-Legal Scholarship in
an Age of Disenchantment 111
Julia J A Shaw
Part III: Place and Practice in the Constitution of the Social
7 T ransnational Legal Processes and the (Re)construction of
the ‘Social’: The Case of Human Trafficking 137
David Nelken
8 A ddressing a ‘Globalized Social’: Mobilization of Law in Global
Networks with Reference to Biofuel Production in Indonesia 157
Jacqueline Vel and Adriaan Bedner
9 S ocio-Legal Studies and the Cultural Practice of Lawyering 181
Hilary Sommerlad
Part IV: Thematic Variations on the Socio
10 The Gendered ‘Socio’ of Socio-Legal Studies 205
Rosemary Hunter
vii
viii Contents
11 Queer Sociality 228
Sally R Munt
12 Bringing Society to Law: A Critically Raced Accounting 251
Francisco Valdes
13 From Responsible Saver to Stewarded Investor? 278
Sally Wheeler
Index 303
Acknowledgments
This book grew out of a one-day conference which I organized on behalf
of the Socio-Legal Studies Association in association with the Institute of
Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, November 2010. Professor
Dave Cowan, then deputy chair of the SLSA, deserves special mention for
encouraging the conference and, in his role as Series Editor of the Palgrave
Macmillan Socio-Legal Studies series, facilitating publication of papers from
the conference. I am grateful to staff at the Institute, especially Belinda
Crothers, Academic Programmes Manager, and Professor Avrom Sherr,
Director, for supporting the conference and later enabling me as a visiting
fellow at the Institute to edit the contributions and to research and write up
the introductory chapter. I am indebted to the contributors for their labour
and patience, especially those who experienced bereavement in the course
of the book’s production. Nils Fietje, Anne Gordon, Abby Taylor, Lourdes
Garcés Tordera, Tony Woods, Gareth Tweedie and friends at Kagyu Samye
Dzong London contributed with various encouragements along the way.
Finally, I thank Rob Gibson, commissioning editor, Palgrave Macmillan, and
Marie Selwood, copy-editor, for their good work.
Dermot Feenan
ix
Notes on Contributors
Adriaan Bedner is a Senior Lecturer at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for
Law, Governance and Development (Faculty of Law, Leiden University).
Most of his research has been on law in Indonesia, with a particular focus on
access to justice, dispute resolution and the judiciary. This has led to publi-
cations on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from administrative courts
and environmental litigation to changes in marriage law regimes and state
responses to witchcraft. He has also done work of a more theoretical and
comparative nature, notably on rule of law and access to justice.
John Clarke is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. Since going
to the Open University in 1980 he has developed and taught on a wide range
of courses, mainly focused on social policy. He has also been a visiting scholar
at a number of other institutions including NOVA in Oslo, the Danish Social
Research Institute in Copenhagen, the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and Central European University in Budapest. His work has centred on
ways in which welfare states have been transformed since the late twentieth
century, with a particular interest in how the relationships between welfare,
state and nation have been reconstructed. He also has a long-standing
concern with the political, cultural and organizational changes associated
with the impact of managerialism on public services and their reform. He is
currently completing a collaborative project on citizenship that will result in
a co-authored book with Kathy Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu
and is working with other colleagues on the politics of policy translation
in transnational settings. Professor Clarke is also part of an ESRC-funded
bilateral research project with Scottish and Swedish colleagues: Governing
by Inspection: School Inspection and Educational Governance in Scotland,
England and Sweden (2010–2013).
Dermot Feenan is a visiting scholar who has held appointments at univer-
sities worldwide, including at Columbia, London, Melbourne and Oxford.
He has published in the Journal of Law & Society, Social & Legal Studies and
the International Journal of the Sociology of Law. He was on the Executive
Committee of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) for six years and is
a former chair of the SLSA Research Grants Committee.
Rosemary Hunter is a Professor of Law at the University of Kent. She is a
feminist legal scholar who was one of the organizers of the UK Feminist
Judgments Project. She was formerly Chair of the Working Group on Gender
and Law of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law and the academic
editor of Feminist Legal Studies. Her current roles include chairing the UK
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