The Every Day Work of Studying the Law in Everyday Life

Abstract

Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday life of scholarship has led her to study the everyday life of the law. In this article, she describes her scholarly life through seven chapters of relatively distinct challenges and themes. Across the arc of her life, she identifies the recurrent influence of both serendipity and theoretical inference acting within the immediate constraints of family and personal capacity. Reading across descriptions of her work on regulatory enforcement, dispute negotiation and mediation, and popular legal culture and consciousness, she points to the necessity of reconciling on-the-ground vicissitudes of doing legal work with the theories and narratives social scientists construct to make sense of institutions and history. She muses on theoretical attempts to align the particular and the general, the micro and macro forces working in legal cultures, and concludes by celebrating the ubiquity of social ordering whose own momentum both seduces and frustrates social scientists.

How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

“…Silbey, too, has argued for greater focus on relationality to develop a comprehensive social scientific understanding of law. She writes, “We need to get beyond conceptions of compartmentalized social action by depicting the relational interdependence that may be elided in efforts to produce reliable and valid depictions of ‘social facts as things’” (Silbey, 2019, p. 16).…”

Rank Has Its Privileges: Explaining Why Laboratory Safety Is a Persistent Challenge

“…We controlled for lab size operationalized as the number of people working in the lab. We also controlled for the department that the lab belongs to since disciplinary organizations are impactful in shaping local practices (Silbey, 2019 ; Whitley, 2000 ).…”

“…These power bases (i.e., expertise and funds) become the foundation of the university’s overall status and rank, thus creating yet greater status and power for faculty in their transactions with other organizational members, ultimately providing a shield against external pressures (Weber, 1947 ; Wrong, 1988 ). Although normative and mimetic forces were often thought to enhance compliance through the diffusion of best practices, scientists actively cultivate their unique identities (Clarke & Knights, 2015 ) while protecting the boundaries of their own labs as well as science more generally (Gieryn, 1983 ; Silbey, 2019 ). Labs are usually distinct from one another, with each lab having a unique local culture, usually derived from the personality and philosophy of the principal investigator.…”

Small Transport Operators as Democratic Actors: Work, Politics, and Governance in Delhi

“…Finally, with the focus on the auto‐rickshaw drivers and their insurgent fight for livelihood rights and democratic citizenship (Holston, 2009), the research shows the underlying processes of law and society. Through ethnography in and around the legal system (Merry, 1990; Silbey, 2019), I illuminate rarely heard voices of legal participants from within and beyond courtrooms as they address issues of fairness, equal treatment, and justice. Thus, the paper combines urban politics, the anthropology of democracy, and work with legal anthropology to analyze how the legal actions (De, 2018) of an emergent non‐elite social group (Eckert, 2004; Sivaramakrishnan, 2017) are structured by institutions of law and transport authorities, leading to the creation of a new urban citizen with specialized knowledge and skills.…”