Scholars trained in disciplines like anthropology, history, law, political science, and sociology helped to give rise to the field of law and society over the past two generations. What theories does law and society offer those disciplines in return, and are scholars in those fields looking back to law and society? To answer these questions, this article, which introduces a symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Law & Society Review, brings together scholarship across disciplines to share the possible future influence of law and society on the disciplines. This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon law and society’s contributions over the past two generations and to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.

Comment les professionnels du droit et de la médecine construisent-ils, au tribunal, le statut légal et l’état mental des patients, et comment ces derniers participent-ils à ces constructions? Cet article s’appuie sur l’analyse de 300 audiences à Paris et à New York, au cours desquelles des personnes hospitalisées sans consentement demandent leur sortie. Dans les deux villes, les tribunaux rejettent la grande majorité des requêtes. Ils le font en mobilisant, selon des modalités propres à chaque système, des répertoires juridiques et des capacités de contrôle qui transforment les patients en différents types de sujets utilisables: des personnes dont les droits sont formellement pris en compte à l’audience, mais qui sont néanmoins classées comme nécessitant les interventions sans consentement que la psychiatrie a les moyens d’assurer. À Paris, les professionnels du droit insistent sur les garanties procédurales tout en s’en remettant aux évaluations médicales du consentement des patients, entendu comme une disposition sous-jacente à accepter un traitement au long cours. À New York, les avocats contestent plus directement l’expertise psychiatrique, mais négocient avec médecins et patients autour de la compliance, comprise comme une acceptation de court terme de la médication. L’article propose ainsi de déplacer le regard des figures de sujets autonomes que les dispositifs médico-légaux et sociaux hybrides prétendent produire vers des formes plus contingentes et situées de sujets utilisables, qui rendent possible la coopération professionnelle et le traitement institutionnel dans un contexte de ressources limitées et d’extension des droits des patients.

This essay examines how Law and Society approaches have transformed historical analysis by reconceptualizing law as constitutive of social reality rather than as an isolated formal system. Tracing this methodological revolution from 1960s American legal history through scholars like J. Willard Hurst and Lawrence Friedman to 1990s legal consciousness studies by Patricia Ewick, Susan Silbey and Sally Engle Merry, the essay demonstrates how these frameworks reveal law as lived experience operating through documentary practices and administrative procedures rather than overt coercion. Through examples from British colonial Singapore and Hong Kong, the analysis shows how legal mechanisms normalized authority, how marginalized subjects strategically navigated plural legal systems and how legal transformations eventually became invisible within naturalized landscapes. Law and Society approaches provide historians with three crucial innovations: revealing agency through strategic legal engagement, reconceptualizing power as operating through capillary networks of documentation, and reframing historical transformation as gradual reconfiguration of legal categories that denaturalizes what appears inevitable.

The relationship between political science and sociolegal scholarship is, at it’s best, a constitutive one. This essay argues that the two fields of study have taken turns illuminating important aspects of law, politics, and social life – responding, in turn, to the theoretical and empirical findings of each other. Law and Society scholarship, in particular, presses political scientists to rethink their foundational assumptions about the rule of law, the power of institutions, and the meaning of judicial decision-making and processes. Some of this rethinking may result, as we posited on the panel which gave rise to this work, in a fruitful “undisciplining” of the field, and re-imagining of the political.

We argue that the far-right is turning to law and legal institutions to institutionalize its extreme agendas but does so in the name of democratic values. Right-wing attempts to affirm and repress rights speak to the duality of democracy, often hinging on the perceived worthiness of rights along cultural and ethnic boundaries while still espousing equality for all. To understand and explain this phenomenon, we bring together socio-legal literature and far-right scholarship and focus on the understudied but significant Swedish case, often viewed as exceptional. We analyze critical events within the Swedish polity, such as the free speech crisis over the Quran burnings and recent reforms of the Tidö Agreement, the governing document of the right-wing coalition government, which is deeply influenced by the far-right Sweden Democrats. Empirical evidence shows how right-wing movements go beyond conventional right-against-rights expectations of authoritarian or strongman tactics to instead advocate for liberal values.

Kwalitatieve interviews onder 100 verdachten in Nederlandse strafzaken bieden inzicht in de vraag of ervaren procedurele rechtvaardigheid ertoe doet voor verdachten en, zo ja, welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid voor hen van belang zijn. Het epistemologische vertrekpunt van dit onderzoek verschilt van de kwantitatieve studies die het onderzoeksveld domineren, doordat dit onderzoek nagaat welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid respondenten eventueel zelf ter sprake brengen in plaats van respondenten te vragen naar vooraf bepaalde componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid. De grote meerderheid van de respondenten bracht zelf kwesties ter sprake die met procedurele rechtvaardigheid te maken hebben. Zes componenten vormden de kern van hun rechtvaardigheidspercepties: (1) informatie waarop beslissingen zijn gebaseerd, (2) bejegening, (3) gepaste aandacht, (4) neutraliteit, (5) inspraak en (6) zorgvuldigheid. Hoewel deze componenten overeenkomen met de literatuur over procedurele rechtvaardigheid, noemden respondenten sommige componenten vaker – en andere juist minder vaak – dan men op basis van de literatuur zou verwachten. In het bijzonder speelt neutraliteit een belangrijke rol in de Nederlandse rechtbankcontext die hier werd onderzocht.