SYNOPSIS
Socio-legal studies is a ‘heterogeneous field’Footnote1 that encompasses a broad range of topics. Indeed, recently, legal scholars who regard their work as socio-legal have accepted the inclusion of less obvious and less conventional contexts and sites of socio-legal research including specifically science, technology and the environment on the basis that ‘materiality also matters in socio-legal studies’.Footnote2 This paper explores the recent expansion of the category of socio-legal, or ‘law-in-context’ research to incorporate the methodologies of disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences to include material contexts, or socio-materialities. We argue for a greater recognition of socio-materiality, defined as ‘material structures embodying social relations and vice versa’,Footnote3 in socio-legal research, given that we face mounting environmental challenges – not least the relationship between law, climate and effective mitigation measures. These challenges call for different methodologies, for doing legal research differently by questioning and subverting the abstractness and abstraction of law.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Nicole Graham teaches and researches in the fields of property law and theory, and legal geography. Nicole has written on the relationship between law, environment and culture with a particular focus on property rights, natural resource regulation and the concept of place.
Margaret Davies was a foundation staff member of the Law School at Flinders University. Her research covers several areas of legal theory, including critical legal thought, feminist jurisprudence, the philosophy of property and legal pluralism. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law.
Lee Godden is Director, Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Melbourne. She researches in environmental resources law, natural resources law, water law, and indigenous people’s land and resources rights.
Notes
1 Faulkner et al. (2012), p 6.
2 Faulkner et al. (2012), p 6.
3 Faulkner et al. (2012), p 9.
9 National associations name the fields differently (the Law and Society Association (US), the Socio-Legal Studies Association (UK), and the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand) but terminology is nonetheless indistinct.
11 The distinction between inside and outside perspectives as the basis for formulating disciplinary knowledges of law was significant in twentieth century scholarship, represented most clearly by legal positivist theory and sociology of law. See generally Cotterrell (Citation1998).
13 Many years ago Nicola Lacey referred to a ‘seemingly unbridgeable gap’ between critical legal theory and socio-legal studies (Citation1996, p 143). Since that time, the cross-fertilization of personnel, theory, and ideas has been substantial, even if the terminology remains.
14 As we will explain, this inelegant terminology is about the networks or assemblages that consist of physical, human, and ecological things as part of an enlarged social sphere.
24 The dichotomy ‘law in the books’ and ‘law in action’ is an example of an approach where a separate state based institutionalised law is seen to be expressed or translated in a social context. See generally Pound (Citation1910); Feeley (Citation1976); Sarat (Citation1985). Having said that, Pound’s argument also went the other way – that the antidote to imperfect translatability of formal law to actualised law was improved formal law – that is, law that would relate to actual social circumstances.
26 Some of the legal realists held this view. See, for instance, Llewellyn Citation1931.
28 On anthropocentrism generally, see Plumwood (Citation2002), p 99.
29 The human body has, of course, been a central concern of feminist scholarship, including socio-legal scholarship. See, for instance Grbich (Citation1992).
34 Posthumanism challenges human-nonhuman distinctions, and does this in at least two ways: first, by acknowledging the continuity between human and nonhuman matter, and second by questioning the distinction between humans and machines, technology, and artificial intelligence. See Hayles (Citation1999); Braidotti (Citation2013).
35 Bennett Citation2010, p xiii. The Democritus tradition of materialism also generated a materialist tradition in analytical philosophy (in the twentieth century, known as ‘physicalism’) which has been somewhat more active over the past century than its counterpart in critical philosophy. See e.g. Stoljar Citation2010 and, for a legal theory example, Connolly Citation2010.
40 Bennett Citation2010, p 11, quoting Margulis and Sagan, What is Life?.
43 See for example the work of Chris Butler on the politicisation of urban space that draws on Henri Lefebvre: Butler (Citation2017).
50 For examples of scholarly attention to laws other than environmental and property with regard to regulating humanature relations, see: Rogers and Maloney (Citation2017); Godden (Citation2015); Jasanoff (Citation2016).
51 Eloise Scotford warns against assuming a universal nature in environmental law principles and scholarship, insisting on the appreciation of jurisdictional, doctrinal and cultural differences. See Scotford (Citation2017) Ch1.
53 See Hutchinson (Citation2013). Doctrinal methodology has been conflated, unnecessarily, with positivist philosophy of law and while socio-legal research historically worked against the positivist and liberalist models of law, it is not the case that doctrinal methodology requires the exclusion of other legal philosophies. Furthermore, doctrinal methodologies have been combined successfully with several other methodologies in a range of fields of legal research.
54 Environmental law encompasses a very large and diverse range of sub-fields ranging from planning and environmental impact assessment (EIA), to biological conservation, from mining to marine protection, etc. EIA, in particular, addresses the physical and cultural impacts of human relations with the environment.
82 European Science Foundation and European Cooperation in Science and Technology (2012), cited in Little (Citation2016), pp 62 and 65.
85 McGrath (Citation2010), p 23. McGrath surveyed 896 environmental law articles in the leading Australian environmental law journal and categorised 70% of them in these terms, with the remaining 30% categorised as ‘evaluative’.
98 See, for example, Earth Jurisprudence literature.
144 For a discussion of the distinction between applied and critical legal geographies see: Benson (Citation2012), pp 1445–1446.
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