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Welcome to the Law and Society Review Blog


The 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 teach 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 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 lsa5.lsrblog@blogger.com. Guidelines are on the ‘Guidelines’ tab.

We would like to thank Wiley and the Law and Society Association for their encouragement and Danielle McClellan for her help. 
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Just out in Law & Society Review.   On the heels of the warmest January on record, a new paper on indigenous groups' human rights claims in the face of climate change... Realizing the Right to Be Cold? Framing Processes and Outcomes Associated with the Inuit Petition on Human Rights and Global Warming Is protection from climate change a human right? In 2005, Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, on behalf Inuit based in the Canadian arctic and Alaska and with the support of two American environmental NGOs, submitted a petition against the United States before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights alleging that the United States was responsible for how climate change had undermined their human rights, culture, property, traditional land, health, life, integrity, and security, subsistence, and housing – an argument that could referred to as asserting the right to be cold. The petition supported an influential transnational effort to build linkages between human
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