Roger Cotterrell talks to us about his new edited collection Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law: An Homage to Reza Banakar (Oxford: Hart, 2023). The collection is edited with Håkan Hydén, David Nelken and Ulrike Schultz.
The book is intended as an ambitious, large-scale overview of the current scope of sociology of law, surveying its range of intellectual concerns and discussing its nature as a field of theoretical and empirical research. In the common law world, interdisciplinary social research on law is usually called socio-legal studies, or ‘law and society’ research. The term sociology of law is less often used; it suggests a special link between law and sociology, or a special sensitivity to the distinct traditions of the social sciences, rather than a more general interdisciplinary approach to studying law.
But sociology of law (sociologie juridique, sociologia del diritto, Rechtssoziologie, etc.) is the label very widely used outside the common law world for social scientific research on law. Sociology of law’s aim is to examine and assess the social conditions and social effects of legal ideas and practices, and to study empirically using social scientific methods the activities involved in creating, interpretating, enforcing, and invoking law. This research enterprise and its scope is now very extensive, indeed world-wide, so our book runs to 476 pages and contains 34 essay contributions from scholars from more than a dozen different countries. The four co-editors are based in the UK, Sweden, and Germany.
The initial impetus was a need felt by the co-editors to mark a very sad occurrence: the untimely death of a cherished colleague and, for some of us, a longstanding friend. We wanted to make something constructive out of a professional and personal loss. Reza Banakar was the greatly respected holder of the established Chair of Sociology of Law at Lund University, in Sweden. Born in Iran, he had taught in Sweden, then in Oxford and London. Lund has long been an important European centre for sociology of law and after some years at the University of Westminster Reza accepted the call back to Sweden to take the prestigious Lund chair. He carried out important empirical research on legal responses to racial discrimination in Sweden and also, revisiting his roots, on legal culture in Iran, especially as reflected in its striking patterns of road traffic behaviour.
He was also a social theorist of law and co-edited important books on socio-legal theory and research methods. So, he covered all the bases for sociology of law, and became a major international figure in the field. It was natural that the primary initiative for a book to honour his memory and his research contribution should come from Lund. Håkan Hydén, Reza’s predecessor in the Lund Chair, set the project in motion, inviting three of Reza’s international friends, David Nelken (KCL), Ulrike Schultz (based in Hagen, Germany) and me, to join in.
I first met Reza in 1996 when he invited me to Lund for the first time. We kept close contact through all the subsequent years and collaborated on many projects. I shared his deep affection for Scandinavia in general and Lund in particular. So, he became, for me, central to a much-valued academic network there. Now, this new book will be a permanent, tangible reminder of him. The editors and contributors hope that it will also be a significant contribution to the exciting, ever-growing, international movement for theoretical and empirical social scientific research on legal phenomena.
The range of topics reflects the scope of the field. Reza used to speak of sociology of law as a ‘stepchild’ of its parent disciplines, law and sociology. But, like me, he did not think that ultimately its disciplinary identity was crucial. In my view, at least, sociology of law is a field of practice, mediating tensions among what Pierre Bourdieu called the juridical and political fields and civil society. So, it escapes sharp disciplinary boundaries and relies on its own ideas of the nature and scope of law. Inevitably then, the range of topics in our book is very broad but all of them are focused on the social meaning and experience of law.
They include legal pluralism and multiculturalism, the sociology of corporate law, aspects of the legal cultures of many countries (including Turkey, Russia, the USA, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Iran), the sociology of constitutions, socio-legal responses to sexual violence, the regulation of industrial relations, pandemic regulatory strategies, public opinion and popular knowledge of law, and the ever-widening relations of law and technology.
For me, as no doubt for the other editors, the range of issues addressed in the book illustrates just how pervasive the social scientific study of legal phenomena has now become, impacting on all of law’s expanding doctrinal fields. Researching in sociology of law is a means to study sociologically all the major areas of social life, but specifically through the prisms of legal practice and legal experience.