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Welcome to the Law and Society Review Blog

The current editors of Law and Society Review have started this blog with the goal of facilitating broader dissemination of socio-legal research. We hope that this blog allows us to discuss scholarship and teaching issues that may not make it to academic journals quickly.  We invite everyone to contribute; we ask all authors to summarize their recent articles.
The new blog will also allow us to discuss the changing research environment.  We’d like to hear more people contribute to pressing conversations around research and publishing.  Many of us already have these conversations among smaller groups of scholars. A blog will allow a larger conversation with more participants and, we hope, a greater diversity of views.   
The questions to weigh in on are many.  Professional associations and funding agencies occasion talk about the press for data access in both Europe and North America.  What do you think about this issue, in every dimension from ethical to epistemological to administrative? What do we think about the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk as a research tool? How do ethical practices translate to obligations cross-nationally? What are ethical dilemmas in research resulting from  the increasing availability of records on the internet? What do we do with what we know about the production of records by state agencies, including police, when big data analytics often do not rely on that knowledge?
We live in the midst of information overload, and the wish to cut through the noise allows elites to make simple false statements, repeating them over and over and possibly promoting significant policy changes.  We do not know whether a blog making information more accessible will help counter ‘alternative facts.’  We do know we want to make the forum available.


Please send all proposed contributions to lsr@vt.edu  Guidelines are on the ‘Guidelines’ tab.
We would like to thank Wiley and the Law and Society Association for their encouragement, Danielle McClellan for her help, and Emily Flores (VT MPA, 2016) and Anne Zobell (Ph.D. Student, VT) for setting up the website and maintaining it.
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Comment: Making valid claims in social science research: A comment on Jenness and Calavita

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