Inquiry and Activism in Law and Society

Abstract

Two events in the past twelve months have made me think about the law and society field and activism—two events and many years of telling myself that our field is about more than research.

The Unbearable Lightness of Rights: On Sociolegal Inquiry in the Global Era

“…Rather, it is a foundational dimension of our engagement with the world. Our scholarship and teaching about rights affirms that rights matter, thus adding weighty significance to rights‐based aspiration (Munger ). It is relevant in this regard that, a dozen or so years ago, I was a member of a group of well‐known sociolegal scholars, many of whom are in the room today, who planned a book of essays on rights as practice.…”

“…Finally, for those of us in the United States, a global sensitivity should highlight for ourselves, our fellow citizens, our students, and especially elite power wielders, just how narrow our rights traditions are in the United States, and how Americans' fidelity to those inherited ideas leads us to ignore and foreclose what Milan Kundera calls “unrealized possibilities” for reconstructing our community and its influence in the world. Indeed, this is what Boaventura Santos has called critical theory: the inquiry into the “possibilities … that exist beyond what is empirically given” (quoted in Munger : 9). In this regard, a major contribution of sociolegal scholars is to direct attention to novel ideas about rights and justice taken seriously elsewhere but ignored, misunderstood, or undervalued in our own legal establishment.…”

“…In that same year, the annual meeting keynote address was delivered by president Sally Merry, a leading scholar whose research agenda was shifting from ordinary disputing among working class people in the United States to disputing over gender violence and women's rights beyond the U.S. mainland, first in colonial and post‐colonial Hawaii, and then in Asia and other regions outside of the United States (Merry , ). Merry invited Boa Santos to deliver the 1995 address (Santos ), and other presidents—including Susan Silbey (), David Engel (), and Frank Munger ()—focused their addresses in subsequent years on scholarship that merged attention to legal practices and human rights within and beyond the United States.…”

Looking for Race in All the Wrong Places

“…Their review of the literature shows the more general trend: while law and society scholars tend to be deeply concerned with inequality in a general sense (such as the contest between the haves and the have-nots and the powerful versus the powerless that characterize many studies of the law in action), they have not been centrally concerned with racial inequality. 14 For example, reflecting the state of the field they survey, Seron 13 In their presidential addresses to the association, several past presidents have noted that a central goal of the law and society project is to promote social justice (Handler 1992;Merry 1995;Engel 1999;Munger 2001;Calavita 2002;Erlanger 2005;Feeley 2007; see also Abel 2010: 19;Garth & Sterling 1998). 14 This is not to say that law and society scholars have been particularly concerned with class-based or gender-based inequality either, but those two topics have been more prominent in the literature than race-based inequality.…”

The Politics of Rights: Then and Now

“…36 36 It seems to me that most proponents of decentering law have pursued it at least in part because of their own left leaning ideological commitments and interests (see, for example, Frank Munger's Presidential Address to the Law and Society Association in 2000; Munger 2001, 10–11). In a comment on an earlier draft of this article, Michael McCann took issue with my sense of decentering and what motivates it.…”