This innovative handbook provides a comprehensive, and truly global, overview of the main approaches and themes within law and society scholarship or social-legal studies.
A one-volume introduction to academic resources and ideas that are relevant for today’s debates on issues from reproductive justice to climate justice, food security, water conflicts, artificial intelligence, and global financial transactions, this handbook is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Perspectives and Approaches’, accessibly explains a variety of frameworks through which the relationship between law and society is addressed and understood, with emphasis on contemporary perspectives that are relatively new to many socio-legal scholars. Following the book’s overall interest in social justice, the entries in this section of the book show how conceptual tools originate in, and help to illuminate, real-world issues. The second and largest section of the book (42 short well-written pieces) presents reflections on topics or areas concerning law, justice, and society that are inherently interdisciplinary and that are relevance to current – but also classical – struggles around justice. Informing readers about the lineage of ideas that are used or could be used today for research and activism, the book attends to the full range of local, national and transnational issues in law and society. The authors were carefully chosen to achieve a diverse and non-Eurocentric view of socio-legal studies.
This volume will be invaluable for law students, those in inter-disciplinary programs such as law and society, justice studies and legal studies, and those with interests in law, but based in other social sciences. It will also appeal to general readers interested in questions of justice and rights, including activists and advocates around the world.
Contested laws, contested societies: introductory remarks Part 1: Contemporary Perspectives and Approaches 1. Actor-Network Theory and socio legal analysis 2. Critical legal studies: A curious case of hegemony without dominance 3. Critical race theory: Emergence and New Lines of Inquiry 4. Feminism 5. Governmentality and sociolegal studies 6. Indigenous law: What non-Indigenous people can learn from Indigenous legal thought 7. Liberalism 8. Postcolonial legal studies 9. Queer theory and socio-legal studies 10. Transnational governance and law: Global security and socio-legal studies Part 2: Sites of Engagement 11. Agriculture, Law, and the State 12. Animals 13. Artificial Intelligence and Public Law 14. Capitalism and capital 15. Censorship: state control of expression 16. Cities and urbanization 17. Citizenship 18. Class and economic inequality 19. Climate Justice 20. Corporations 21. Data 22. Domestic work: transnational regulation 23. Extractivism: Socio-legal Approaches to Relations with Lands and Resources 24. Finance, banking and debt 25. Food sovereignty and food justice 26. Gender and Law 27. Genocide 28. Human Rights: Challenging Universality 29. Immigration, Law and Resistance 30. Imperialism and law 31. Incarceration: how to understand imprisonment rates 32. Indicators: Sociolegal Dimensions of Quantification 33. Indigeneity: making and contesting the concept 34. Infrastructure: socio-legal aspects of a key word of our time 35. Islamic law and the state 36. Jurisdiction 37. Labour and employment 38. Legal consciousness 39. Migration 40. Ownership: Persons, property, and community 41. Ownership of intangibles: Intellectual Property and the Contested Commons 42. From reproductive rights to reproductive justice 43. Settler colonialism 44. Sexuality 45. Sovereignty 46. Space and belonging 47. Supply chains and logistics 48. Territory and law 49. The Transnational Law of Human Trafficking 50. Water disputes across borders 51. Water justice and indigenous peoples 52. White Supremacy
Mariana Valverde is a Sociolegal Scholar, who has taught at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, and Sociolegal Studies Canada for 25 years. Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Professor at the University of Toronto in Criminology and Legal Studies, Canada, with a cross-appointment in Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Eve Darian-Smith is a Professor and the Chair of Global & International Studies Department at the University of California, Irvine, USA. Prabha Kotiswaran is a Professor of Law & Social Justice at King’s College London, UK.
