Comparing sociology and law and society

What does it mean that both sociology and law and society study how individuals and groups interact in context, and how those interactions are shaped by structure?

Structures are patterned social relationships (Sewell Reference Sewell1992). For law and society, the central structure is the law – including both formal elements (statutes, court decisions, regulations, policies) and informal ones (norms, meanings, unwritten rules). Sociologists may study the law but more often center other structures – economic arrangements, racial hierarchies, patriarchy – as primary objects of analysis. Structures may vary across spatial contexts (e.g., countries, states, counties) or change over time (e.g., birth cohorts, historical periods). Their associated norms and rules are implemented by institutions, which link individuals to structure. Yet institutions are not autonomous actors; they are operated by individuals – that is, relatively empowered street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky Reference Lipsky2010 [1980]) – who interpret and enforce rules in interaction with less empowered clients. Both disciplines examine how mechanisms or processes through which structures are enacted, reinforced, or contested shape these interactions.

A brief example illustrates how these concepts operate in practice. One enduring structure in the United States is citizenship, which governs the distribution of both material (e.g., income) and symbolic (e.g., social inclusion) resources (Massey Reference Massey2007). Federal statutes, court rulings, regulations, and policies have long drawn boundaries between citizens and noncitizens. This divide has become more pronounced since the mid-1970s (Fox Reference Fox2016; Moinester Reference Moinester2024), when the federal government tightened access to public assistance, restricted work authorization, and expanded federal-local partnerships to expand immigration enforcement into the U.S. interior.

Yet the experience of non-citizenship varies by context, including states. These differences are perhaps most visible within institutions (Asad and Baer-Bositis Reference Asad and Baer-Bositis2025; Menjívar Reference Menjívar2023). Regarding policing, for example, undocumented immigrants can apply for a driver’s license in California but not in Texas (National Conference of State Legislatures 2021). In Texas, driving undocumented may lead to citation, detention, or deportation because Texas does not offer driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants; in California, these risks are reduced because the state allows undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. A state law granting licenses to undocumented immigrants operates as a mechanism that partially mitigates the structural constraints of non-citizenship in police interactions. As we see below, a sociological analysis might frame this variation as evidence of how “immigrant friendly” a state is, whereas a sociolegal analysis would highlight how the law’s constitutive power shapes immigrants’ decisions about when and how to engage with institutions like the police.Footnote ²

Sociology and law and society thus share many commitments, even as their interpretations may slightly differ. Both are concerned with how structures are reproduced through institutions and filtered through interactions, and whether and how structures, institutions, and/or interactions vary across space and time.

Building law and society with sociology

I now turn to how distinct aspects of sociology might contribute to law and society. While sociology has already infused much into law and society, I see two areas where more contributions could be made: developing sociolegal theory as a more systematic enterprise and better linking theoretical frameworks to empirical data.

First, law and society could draw more directly from sociology’s approaches to theory-building. Some sociolegal scholars have argued that the field must move beyond producing “theoretically informed, high-quality empirical research at a more detailed scale or in new contexts” and toward “the production of new, high-quality theoretical insights at a larger scale” (Rubin and Shalaby Reference Rubin and Shalaby2025:2; see also Liu Reference Liu2015; Morrill et al. Reference Morrill, Edelman, Fang and Greenspan2020). Even as theoretically informed, empirically driven research remains valuable, one way to more actively build theory is to confront, head-on, the question of what counts as theory. In sociology, Abend (Reference Abend2008) identifies seven distinct meanings of theory; a similar exercise in law and society would help clarify the kinds of theorizing already underway. It could also help articulate what “theory” might look like as a subfield of the discipline of law and society. Sociology has institutional structures for developing sociological theory: the American Sociological Association’s Theory Section, dedicated journals, and multiple venues for theoretical exchange. By contrast, the Law and Society Association has no comparable, field-wide infrastructure defining and supporting sociolegal theory. Collaborative Research Networks may focus on particular theoretical traditions (e.g., New Legal Realism), key thinkers (e.g., Foucault and Sociolegal Studies), or disciplinary bridges (e.g., Philosophy and Legal Theory), but there do not appear to be coordinated, discipline-wide efforts to cultivate sociolegal theory as such. Establishing such a space could move the field beyond periodic calls for greater theorization and toward sustained, collective development of its theoretical foundations (Rubin Reference Rubin2025; c.f. Levine Reference Levine2025).

Recent work by sociologists in law and society shows the rewards of such an investment. A perennial challenge in both disciplines is bridging “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches: do structures constrain individuals, or do individuals exercise agency within – and sometimes against – those structures? In sociology, “relational sociology” has emerged as one way forward (Desmond Reference Desmond2014; Emirbayer Reference Emirbayer1997). It conceives of interactions between differently positioned actors – one more empowered, one less so – as both shaped by and constitutive of broader structures. Individuals have agency in these encounters, but the encounters themselves may reproduce or transform the structures in which they occur. Clair’s (Reference Clair2020) study of how attorney-client interactions constitute and reproduce inequality in criminal courts exemplifies this approach. Nielsen’s (Reference Nielsen2024) “relational rights” framework likewise links the institutional and the individual to illuminate how and where law can advance social justice.

This relational perspective also underlies my own work. In Engage and Evade (Asad Reference Asad2023), I examine how the meanings that undocumented immigrants hold about involvement in mainstream institutions transcend those which their legal status alone might suggest. Drawing on five years of interviews with Latino immigrant families in Dallas, ethnographic observation in Dallas Immigration Court, and analyses of the American Time Use Survey, I show how undocumented immigrants modulate their institutional involvement – avoiding some interactions while pursuing others – in ways associated with their overlapping social roles (e.g., worker, parent). I call this “selective engagement.” Immigrants believe this selective engagement helps them meet the expectations of institutional authorities who monitor their children’s well-being (e.g., doctors, teachers). They also hope that it may, one day, bolster their claims to immigration authorities that they are deserving of a pathway to citizenship. Yet court observations and interviews with formerly undocumented immigrants reveal that selective engagement rarely secures this outcome absent a direct opportunity from the federal government. The analysis shows that surveillance operates not only through the threat of exclusion but also through the promise of inclusion, and that both institutional involvement and non-involvement – including avoidance (Brayne Reference Brayne2014) – are strategies for managing life under surveillance.

Second, sociology can help law and society better connect theoretical insights to empirical measures of law’s constitutive power. By constitutive power, I refer to how the law “is a particular way of organizing meaning and force, and it is out of this that both law in action and law on the books proceed” (Silbey Reference Silbey2005:359); in other words, law contributes to the making of everyday consciousness and practice. If law shapes daily life not only through laws, regulations, and policies but also through how they are perceived and experienced, then empirical strategies must capture both these formal and (inter-)subjective dimensions. Sociologists have innovated in this area, developing measures of phenomena such as gentrification (Hwang et al. Reference Hwang, Dahir, Sarukkai and Wright2023) and social integration (Phillips et al. Reference Phillips, Levy, Sampson, Small and Wang2021) that link theory to lived experience. Similar creativity could expand sociolegal approaches to operationalizing “law in action.”

In my research on immigration enforcement, I have sought to capture this constitutive dimension through the concept of “salience” – the degree to which immigration enforcement registers in public consciousness. Standard proxies, such as measures of laws, policies, or enforcement actions, do not always predict adverse outcomes among those most vulnerable to enforcement (see Asad and Clair Reference Asad and Clair2018; Perreira and Pedroza Reference Perreira and Pedroza2019 for a review). I operationalize salience with Google Trends data, which measures search interest in immigration enforcement-related terms. Across several studies focused on mental and physical health, I show how salience helps explain outcomes that laws, policies, and actions alone cannot. One study using the National Survey of Latinos finds that deportation fears increased among Latino U.S. citizens but remained stable among noncitizens between 2007 and 2018. Comparing national deportation rates (which remained high but stable across this period) to national search volumes for “deportation” (which fluctuated), I suggest the latter helps explain this dynamic (Asad Reference Asad2020a). Another study compares the effects of dramatic societal events (e.g., Trump’s first election) and more everyday contexts (i.e., interior immigration enforcement actions and salience) on Latino U.S. citizens and noncitizens’ psychological distress in the National Health Interview Survey. The everyday contexts, particularly salience for U.S. citizens, proves consistently more consequential (Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Levesque, Lewis and Asad2024). My ongoing work examines the health of infants with Latina immigrant mothers, testing whether infants whose mothers live in counties with high enforcement salience have lower average birthweights – a marker of early-life stratification processes (see Torche and Nobles Reference Torche and Nobles2024 for a review). This approach could also be incorporated into qualitative research, where salience could serve as an additional contextual layer to report alongside descriptions of prevailing laws, policies, or actions.

Building sociology with law and society

Law and society also has much to offer sociology. Two potential contributions stand out: learning to take the multivalent, constitutive nature of law seriously and making room for discussing the normative implications of scholarship.

First, law and society reminds sociologists to take law seriously in all its forms. Sociology tends to use theory to explain individual behavior, group dynamics, and institutional patterns within and across a variety of social structures; law and society strives to explain the same but with law as its central structuring force. In most sociological analysis, law is one factor among many, often treated as a backdrop against which social life unfolds. By contrast, sociolegal scholars insist that studying formal laws, policies, and regulations alone are insufficient. Law operates through its constitutive power: legality – the meanings, practices, and shared understandings surrounding law – is constructed, experienced, and contested in daily life, such that the “law on the books” often diverges from the “law in action” (Pound Reference Pound1910). In this sense, law and society treats legality as the key to understanding law as a social structure, whereas sociology situates law within a wider array of structures. This constitutive view of law also invites a more dynamic approach to scale and method: because law shapes and is shaped by micro-level encounters, meso-level organizational practices, and macro-level state and transnational regimes, sociolegal research often links these levels in ways that reveal how law operates across contexts and scales.

What might taking law seriously in all its forms look like in practice? Returning to the earlier example of driver’s license access and policing, a sociologist and a sociolegal scholar might both study deportation fears but frame their explanations differently. From a sociological perspective, a driver’s license law positions California as more “immigrant-friendly” than Texas, particularly if accompanied by other immigrant-friendly policies. Deportation fears should thus be lower in California: access to driver’s licenses mitigates one form of citizenship privilege that disadvantages undocumented immigrants in interactions with police and other authorities. From a law and society perspective, however, driver’s license access is not simply a “law on the books” but an expression of law’s constitutive power. In California, some undocumented immigrants may still avoid applying for licenses, fearing inclusion in state databases that could be weaponized in the future (Asad Reference Asad2020b). In Texas, by contrast, the absence of access to driver’s licenses interacts with collective meanings and norms surrounding immigration enforcement to shape understandings of when the law is dangerous, when it can be engaged, and for whom. Both approaches are complementary, but they represent distinct vantage points on the relationship between the law on the books and the law in action, and one that may further help inform a range of sociological theories (e.g., on assimilation or intergroup boundaries).Footnote ³

Second, law and society reminds sociologists to grapple more directly with the normative implications of their research.Footnote ⁴ Both sociology and law and society generally embrace an ostensible neutrality in how they frame and study research questions.Footnote ⁵ This is because social scientists ask “big questions” that reflect the intellectual agenda of their respective disciplines, while their empirical strategies provide the foundation for the answers to these questions. Analytic neutrality thus serves as an effort to ensure continuity in intellectual conversations and comparability in evaluating answers to the questions we ask across studies (Lamont Reference Lamont2009).Footnote ⁶

But what should scholars do with the answers to these big questions? Here, the two disciplines diverge. Many sociologists are motivated by concerns about inequality, myself included, but the discipline has long debated whether and when it is appropriate to make prescriptive claims in scholarly research (Calhoun Reference Calhoun2005; Clawson et al. Reference Clawson, Zussman, Misra, Gerstel and Stokes2007; Jeffries Reference Jeffries and Jeffries2009; Smith Reference Smith2024; Wilson Reference Wilson2011). Exposing social inequality is often treated as a sufficient scholarly contribution, while policy research that may help translate that knowledge into the public sphere has historically been considered a separate enterprise. This is in part because of the “normalizing pressures of careers” that tend to reward scholarly contributions over public impact (Burawoy Reference Burawoy2005: 5; see also DiPrete and Fox-Williams Reference DiPrete and Fox-Williams2021; Gans Reference Gans1989; Menjívar Reference Menjívar2022).

Law and society, by contrast, has been more comfortable pairing empirical analysis with explicit consideration of the work’s normative implications. This partly reflects the field’s position between legal academia (where normativity is an essential component of scholarly writing and publication) and social science (where theory and empirics reign supreme). While some sociolegal scholars caution against normative engagement that sacrifices academic independence for “the pull of the policy audience” (see Levine Reference Levine1990; Sarat and Silbey Reference Sarat and Silbey1988), the presidential addresses of the Law and Society Association consistently illustrate an orientation toward discussion of the normative (Seron et al. Reference Seron, Coutin and Meeusen2013: 292). Herbert Jacob (Reference Jacob1983: 407), for example, asked: “Are we within sight of certain enough knowledge to guide policy makers?” Though skeptical, he concluded that “[w]e can begin to inform policy makers about some of the probable unanticipated consequences of their actions even if we cannot state with certainty the outcome of reforms” (420). Two decades later, Kitty Calavita (Reference Calavita2002) argued for “the urgent need for a commitment to engaged research,” insisting on “the impulse to figure it out because it makes a difference if we figure it out” (7, emphasis in original). As she noted, such engagement should not mean confining oneself to narrow policy-specific issues but rather asking “the kinds of larger questions that may advance not only social justice but theory development generally” (8). And, as Kim Lane Scheppele (Reference Scheppele2023: 425) reminded us, “we do not have the option to do nothing,” particularly when “[u]niversities are being attacked and their once-secure academic walls have been breached in all democracies in trouble.”

Although perspectives within law and society vary on how effective it is to consider the normative implications of research, examples abound of scholarship that identifies and targets the mechanisms underlying social problems. Such work draws on foundational social science principles to establish the social facts and mechanisms in play, applies policy research to understand how those mechanisms operate in institutional contexts, and engages in conceptual innovation to imagine how societies might be remade in more just ways. Clair’s (Reference Clair2020; Reference Clair, Dong, Goldstein and Henry2025) recent work offers a model of this integration. Identifying mistrust between criminal defendants and their attorneys, he designed a systems navigator program in Santa Clara County, California, that pairs non-lawyer advocates with public defenders to facilitate communication and enhance dignity in the attorney-client relationship. No single study is likely to remedy society’s many injustices, but sociolegal scholarship that consciously bridges theory, empirics, and policy exemplifies how research can advance both intellectual conversations and social justice.

For sociologists, the lesson is not to abandon analytic rigor for normativity’s sake but to recognize that discussing the normative implications of academic research can be theoretically and empirically generative. It can broaden our research questions, push us to consider the stakes of our analytical decisions, and connect our work to non-academic debates about reform and justice. Law and society thus offers a reminder worth carrying forward: that explaining the social world and evaluating its fairness are not mutually exclusive enterprises.