Socio-legal studies have had an ambivalent relationship with the 'legal' – one of its defining aspects, but at the same time one that the discipline has sought to transcend or even leave behind. While socio-legal studies benefit hugely from the insights, methods and theories of other social science and humanity disciplines, the contributions to Exploring the 'Legal' in Socio-Legal Studies illustrate the value of a focus on the 'legal'. The chapters in this book combine traditional legal materials and analyses with other ways of engaging empirically with the 'legal'. They illustrate the rich potential of the 'legal' as a site both for theoretical and methodological reflection and for case study analysis. Taken as a whole, this volume demonstrates that methodological discussion is most helpful when rooted in empirical cases, and that the best case studies also help us to develop our methodologies. Bringing methodology and empirical analysis together offers an opportunity to reflect on socio-legal studies and develop the discipline in productive new directions.

In this insightful collection, a broad range of scholars analyzes a core issue for socio-legal studies, what is understood by the 'socio' of the 'socio-legal'. Drawing from legal theory, cultural studies, and social policy, the collection's wide scope of themes and topics provides an important stock-take and analysis of the socio-legal field.

This timely Research Handbook offers significant insights into an understudied subject, bringing together a broad range of socio-legal studies of medicine to help answer complex and interdisciplinary questions about global health – a major challenge of our time.

This text promotes a more global sociolegal perspective that engages with multiple laws and societies and diverse sociolegal systems based on very different historical and cultural traditions, interacting on multiple local, national, and global levels. The approach to global legal pluralism seeks to provide a framework for envisioning new global governance regimes that move beyond state-based solutions to deal with trenchant transnational challenges.

Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. The vast field of socio-legal studies provides multiple lenses through which law can be considered. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area. The book provides a rich resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and methods available when law is studied in its broadest social context, as well as setting those within the history of the socio-legal movement. The chapters consider multiple disciplinary lenses – including feminism, anthropology and sociology – as well as a variety of methodologies, including: narrative, visual and spatial, psychological, economic and epidemiological approaches. Moreover, these are applied in a range of substantive contexts such as online hate speech, environmental law, biotechnology, research in post-conflict situations, race and LGBT+ lawyers. The handbook brings together younger contributors and some of the best-known names in the socio-legal field. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present and future of sociolegal studies that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests in a range of subjects, including law, sociology and politics. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Socio-legal researchers increasingly recognise the need to employ a wide variety of methods in studying law and legal phenomena, and the need to be informed by an understanding of debates about theory and method in mainstream social science. The papers in this volume illustrate how a range of topics, including EU law, ombudsmen, judges, lawyers, Shariah Councils and the quality assurance industry can be researched from a socio-legal perspective. The objective of the collection is to show how different methods can be used in researching law and legal phenomena, how methodological issues and debates in sociology are relevant to the study of law, and the importance of the debate between "structural" and "action" traditions in researching law. It also approaches the methodological problem of how sociology of law can address the content of legal practice from a variety of perspectives and discusses the relationship between pure and applied research. The editors provide a critical introduction to each of the six sections, and a general introduction on law, sociology and method. The collection will provide an invaluable resource for socio-legal researchers, law school researchers and postgraduates.

These essays seek to re-locate the relationship between the traditional concerns of legal theory and the sociology of law by establishing a consistent theoretical approach to the analysis of law in contemporary Western societies.