Law & Society Review

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On Communicating Scholarship

By Susan M. Sterett

Authors want guides when revising. Jeannine, Margot and I almost always recommend that authors think again about how they make readers care. What does your work tell us about sociolegal processes? If readers are not interested in your particular topic or research site, why would they care about what you’ve written? Authors can always answer that, but they need to. Your data, for whatever kind of data you use, need a story.
You can tell that story in a different fashion in a blog post, which might reach students and draw a wider audience for your work. Everyone I’ve heard in the two meetings I went to over the last couple of days (discussed below) has urged that communicating research to a broader audience is crucial today.
At least within the United States, the question of how to make your work mean something to others has taken on greater bite. Funding cuts to agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundat…

Dispute Resolution Outside of Courts: What We Expect of Ombuds in the UK

Naomi Creutzfeldt, University of Westminster & Ben Bradford, University of Oxford
Our article in the 50th anniversary LSR no 4 explored how people in the UK think about ombuds services and what encourages them to accept the decisions reached during dispute resolution processes. Much empirical evidence points towards the importance of trust and legitimacy in generating acceptance of the decisions made by legal authorities. Moreover, people seem to be more attuned to the quality of the process concerned rather than the outcome it delivers. The procedural fairness of legal authorities – the extent to which they make decisions in an unbiased fashion and adhere to principles of dignity, respect and voice – has consistently been found to be a more important predictor of trust, legitimacy and decision acceptance than the outcomes they provide. This research has mainly taken place in the context of the police and courts. However, one reason for the importance of procedural fairness may be th…

Imagined Law: "We followed the law word by word!"

Prof. Michael Birnhack, Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law Dr. Lotem Perry-Hazan University of Haifa, Faculty of Education
Our teachers in school, back in the 1970s and 1980s used to tell us that they had eyes in their backs, and that they could see us when they were writing on the blackboard. That was the old school way of trying to achieve discipline, by creating a sense of supervision. Discipline was achieved also through the schools’ architecture, typically with the principal’s office overlooking the schoolyard. And there was education too. Our teachers taught us right from wrong. Increasingly, the new school strives to achieve discipline and order by using technological means. Today, in many schools in western democracies, we find a host of technologies, typically Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) systems, and in American schools, one can find metal detectors, biometric identification and other technologies. Schools introduce these technologies in order to achieve security, safety, effici…

What We Learned at Two Political Science Conferences

Jeannine Bell, Susan Sterett, & Margot Young
Your hard working editors attended the Midwest Political Science Association and Western Political Science Association conferences in April. We participated on panels with other editors to discuss journals and editing practices. We also had informal conversations about our experiences with reviewers, administrative processes around having multiple editors, and the kinds of email requests and responses that editors get. We also compared notes on our experiences as authors submitting to journals.

So, first we learned Law and Society Review gets bragging rights for turning around most manuscripts in two months, from submission to decision. We learned that practice from Tim Johnson and Joachim Savelsberg, the previous editors. We thought with all the pressure on faculty to get their work out these days, all journal aimed for a quick turnaround. The journal editors we spoke to at the conferences do. We heard complaints, though, about…

#istandwithCEU

Dr. Susan Sterett Virginia Tech

The Hungarian legislature has just enacted legislation that will shut down Central European University in Budapest, a unique private American/ Hungarian university in Budapest dedicated to teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences.The university is accredited in the United States and in Europe. The Law and Society Association has joined other professional associations in writing letters to the ambassador and the Minister of Education recognizing the threat the legislation poses to the free circulation of ideas.The Law and Society Association met in Budapest in 2001 and, and faculty, staff and students at CEU warmly greeted us.Since then, we have continued connections with colleagues in Hungary through CRNs.
People have poured into the streets to protest the legislation.Thanks to Twitter, you can see photos at #istandwithCEU.Streets we hurried through in 2001 on the way to panels or cafes, or stopped in to buy an ice cream, have filled wit…

The Limited Impact of Sociolegal Research

Bill Felstiner is a founder and currently the Vice President of the Chad Relief Foundation, which assists refugees in the Central African Republic. Bill was long a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also been a professor at thee University of Cardiff, and he served as the Director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Spain. He has written on sociolegal perspectives on divorce, as well as on processes of dispute emergence.

Is sociolegal research related or unrelated to legal reform or social change? I argue not that SLR cannot measure reform, but that it does not form the basis of and lead to reform or change. Of course, there is a big difference between law reform, that is reformulating the rule, and changing even a narrow range of legally-relevant behavior, and an even bigger difference between changing a narrow range of legally-relevant behavior and transforming the structural arrangements within which we live…