The latest issue of Law & Society Review is an exciting one for many reasons. It contains the biannual Law and Society Association presidential address and associated commentaries, as well as a series of original research contributions and book reviews. Additionally, as it is our first issue with Cambridge, this issue showcases the journal’s new formatting and logo.

The issue begins with the Presidential Address by past LSA President Laura Beth Nielsen. Nielsen outlines her vision of “relational rights,” or “a way to think about the law that emphasizes, values, privileges and protects important social relationships. This approach embeds discussions of ‘individual rights’ in their relational context” (2). Nielsen’s address is followed by six commentaries by luminaries from across the field who consider Nielsen’s vision in light of their own areas of expertise. Thus, Jennifer Carlson discusses Nielsen’s framework in relation to gun rights; Asad Asad in relation to immigrants’ rights; Michael McCann in relation to the rights literature generally but also with regard to social movements about rights; Kamaria Porter in relation to sexual consent generally and in regard to sexual assault on college campuses; Reuben Jonathan Miller in relation to fear, violence, and the practices of the criminal justice system; Emilie Cloatre and Dave Cowan in relation to materiality and objects. These commentaries offer useful extensions of and challenges to Nielsen’s framework from different and complementary perspectives.

The issue also contains three articles offering theoretically informed empirical research that demonstrates where law and society scholarship thrives in understanding law and legal phenomena in the present and across time, as well as internationally and globally. Mayra Feddersen, Javier Wilenmann, Julia Cavieres, and Maite Gambardella explore the popular law and society concept of legal consciousness in the context of post-2019 Chile and immense dissatisfaction with institutions (increasingly seen around the world), detailing the public’s ambivalence and cynicism despite contradictory feelings of expectation and legal entitlement. Christine M. Bailey, Paul M. Collins Jr., Jesse H. Rhodes, and Douglas Rice explore the phenomenon of legal entrepreneurship, examining how specific advocates for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States were able strategically to craft and disseminate legal ideas about same-sex marriage with important consequences for how LGBTQ+ rights played out (including which rights, and what visions of those rights, activists lobbied for and were enshrined in law). Using a world society framework, Andrew P. Davis and Morgan Johnstonbaugh explore the global diffusion of women’s private-sphere rights, in this case, the passage of laws criminalizing marital rape between 1979 and 2013, identifying the influence of socialization into the global system and the role of global advocacy organizations. Together, these articles explore both law on the books and in action and how people from average citizens to activists to policymakers come to understand how law should behave and what law should do.

These articles are augmented by book reviews by Malcolm M. Feeley, Kalyani Ramnath, Hillary Mellinger, and Amy Nethery.

This issue of Law & Society Review can be read here; all articles are available without charge for the month of April 2024.

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