This article argues for a turn toward social and cognitive psychology in one prominent area of sociolegal studies. Over roughly the past two decades, sociolegal scholars have become increasingly interested in the intersection between law and social identity. In a number of different contexts (disability, indigenous cultural groups, colonialism, race, gender, citizenship, and many others), law has been described as constitutive of social life, culture, and identity. Yet there remains within sociolegal scholarship only the most limited sense of how, why, and to what extent legal institutions constitute social and cultural identity.This gulf in the literature is primarily the result of disciplinary boundaries: Where the influence of law on social identity has been almost exclusively the province of sociolegal studies, the social cognitive mechanisms that give rise to social identity have been studied most extensively within the fields of cultural sociology and social and cognitive psychology. A turn toward these areas of research reveals that law and legal institutions are capable of constituting aspects of human social identity when the investitive criteria that serve as the bases for legal categorization reflect socially salient characteristics.This article further explores the sources of social salience, contending that legal investitive criteria become socially salient in virtue of physical differences, power relations, cultural differences, and deep history. Finally, law's role as an agent of socialization is placed in context, locating law within an array of socially constitutive institutions, including educational institutions, the media, and the family.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is an examination of how the law understands human identity and the whole notion of ‘human being’. On these two notions the law, usually unconsciously, builds the superstructure of ‘human rights’. It explores how the law understands the concept of a human being, and hence a person who is entitled to human rights. This involves a discussion of the legal treatment of those of so-called "marginal personhood" (e.g. high functioning non-human animals; humans of limited intellectual capacity, and fetuses). It also considers how we understand our identity as people, and hence how we fall into different legal categories: such as gender, religion and so on.The law makes a number of huge assumptions about some fundamental issues of human identity and authenticity – for instance that we can talk meaningfully about the entity that we call ‘our self’. Until now it has rarely, if ever, identified those assumptions, let alone interrogated them. This failure has led to the law being philosophically dubious and sometimes demonstrably unfit for purpose. Its failure is increasingly hard to cover up. What should happen legally, for instance, when a disease such as dementia eliminates or radically transforms all the characteristics that most people regard as foundational to the ‘self’? This book seeks to plug these gaps in the literature.

Social Identity and the Law: Race, Sexuality and Intersectionality is an important resource for inquiry into the relationship between law and social identity in the contexts of race, sexuality and intersectionality in the United States. The book provides a systematic legal treatment of selected historical and contemporary civil rights and social justice issues in areas affecting African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and LGBTQ persons from a law and politics perspective. It covers topics such as the legal and social construction of social identity, slavery and the rise of Jim Crow, discrimination based on national origin and citizenship, educational equity, voting rights, workplace discrimination, discrimination in private and public spaces, regulation of intimate relationships, marriage and reproductive justice, and criminal justice. Lecturers will benefit from: Fifty-seven excerpted cases accompanied with engaging questions presented at the beginning of each case to stimulate class discussion. An eResource including 129 supplemental case excerpts and case briefs for all excerpted cases appearing in the book. Suggested reading lists at the end of each chapter recommending key articles and books to help students survey the academic literature on the topics. With a logical chapter structure and accessible writing style, this textbook is an essential companion for use on undergraduate courses on American constitutional law, civil liberties and civil rights, social justice, and race and law.

This volume of essays contributes to the understanding of global law reform by questioning the assumption in law and development theory that laws fail to transfer because of shortcomings in project design and implementation. It brings together leading scholars who demonstrate that a synthesis of law and development, comparative law and regulatory perspectives (disciplines which to date have remained intellectually isolated from each other) can produce a more nuanced understanding about development failures. Arguing for a refocusing of the analysis onto the social demand for legal transfers, and drawing on empirically rich case studies, contributors explore what recipients in developing countries think about global legal reforms. This analytical focus generates insights into how key actors in developing countries understand global law reforms and how to better predict how legal reforms are likely to play out in recipient countries.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel, and Schiller. Always a champion of Romanticism, Schelling advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, which maintained aesthetics and the creative imagination to be of the highest value. At the same time, Schelling's concerns for the self and the rational make him a major precursor to existentialism and phenomenology. The New Schelling brings together a wide-ranging set of essays which elaborate the connections between Schelling and other thinkers—such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan—and argue for the unexpected modernity of Schelling's work. Contributors: Manfred Frank, Jürgen Habermas, Iain Hamilton Grant, Joseph Lawrence, Odo Marquand, Judith Norman, Alberto Toscano, Michael Vater, Alistair Welchman, Slavoj Š ZiŠzek.

This book contributes to a critical reflection of current legislative and jurisprudential developments in Non-Discrimination Law, focusing on the European Union. The book is focused on intersectionality between gender, race and disability and the question of whether, and to what extent, this intersection can be adequately addressed in (EU) law. The discussion rests on two basic assumptions. First, the multiplication of 'discrimination grounds' in EU law and other legal regimes should not result in a dilution of the demands of equality law. Accordingly, the book focuses on the three key grounds - race, gender and disability. These constitute nodes around which other discrimination grounds can be grouped. Second, any multi-ground non-discrimination law framework needs to engage with the question of discrimination on several grounds. This book provides a critical evaluation of some of the problems presented by such intersectionality and an opportunity to explore the issues in depth. This collection offers some new proposals relating to the regrouping of identity categories and to the general approach to socio-legal research in the field. It also contains a comparative section, which expands on practical experiences with intersectionality and law, and a section dedicated to juridical responses to intersectionality. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics and those working in the area of EU non-discrimination law and policy.