My discipline of History, particularly in the areas of Islamic law and legal history generally, has undergone a significant methodological shift toward “Law and Society” approaches in recent decades. Traditional historical inquiry treats legal texts and institutional frameworks as primary subjects, analyzing their development, transformation and formal operation over time. Law and Society scholarship leads historians to understand how legal systems actually functioned in practice, how law mediated social conflict and economic relations, and how legal frameworks both enabled and constrained various forms of power and resistance. As historians shift toward Law and Society approaches, they recognize that law is integral to how these phenomena operate. This shift recognizes that law is never separate from economic relations, cultural formations or expressions of violence – law is integral to how these phenomena operate.

The transformation of legal history during the 1960s from viewing law as an isolated formal system to understanding its social embeddedness emerged from scholars who fundamentally reconceptualized the discipline. J. Willard Hurst of the University of Wisconsin Law School was the central architect of this revolution, establishing through The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Reference Hurst1950) and Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (1956) the theoretical framework that gained widespread acceptance during the 1960s. Hurst challenged the prevailing doctrinal approach by arguing that legal historians should examine law as a dynamic instrument employed to achieve concrete social and economic objectives rather than as abstract formal rules. His methodology emphasized studying the actual operation of legal institutions and their relationships to broader social forces, particularly economic modernization and democratic participation (Hurst Reference Hurst1956: 3).

Lawrence Friedman expanded these insights throughout the 1960s, specifically in A History of American Law (Reference Friedman1973), which systematically examined how legal transformations reflected broader social change. He introduced the concept of “legal culture,” encompassing the attitudes, values and practices that determine how law actually functions in society beyond formal statutes and judicial opinions. This approach revealed gaps between law as written and law as experienced, demonstrating how legal change often reflected shifts in social power rather than abstract principles of justice. Morton Horwitz developed his thesis about the fundamental restructuring of American legal thought during this period, later published as The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Reference Horwitz1977). His analysis showed how American legal doctrines shifted from protecting traditional property rights to facilitating economic development, revealing how apparently neutral legal principles actually served particular class interests while judges consciously reshaped doctrines to promote entrepreneurial capitalism.

These innovations emerged within the broader intellectual context of the 1960s, drawing inspiration from social history’s emphasis on ordinary people and social structures rather than elite political figures. The civil rights movement and other social movements contributed to growing awareness of how law could function both as an instrument of oppression and as a tool for change, encouraging legal historians to examine relationships between legal doctrine and social power and explore disparities between legal promises and legal realities.

The “cultural turn” in historical scholarship during the 1970s and 1980s provided the intellectual foundation for later Law and Society approaches to legal consciousness. Lynn Hunt articulated this methodological shift in The New Cultural History (Reference Hunt1989), theorizing how historians could analyze culture as a constitutive force in social and political life rather than merely as a reflection of material conditions. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz influenced this movement through his concept of “thick description” in The Interpretation of Cultures (Reference Geertz1973), providing historians with analytical tools for interpreting culture as a complex system of meanings that shaped human action. Natalie Zemon Davis pioneered microhistorical approaches emphasizing cultural analysis in works like The Return of Martin Guerre (Reference Davis1983), demonstrating how individual stories could illuminate broader cultural patterns and social understandings. This cultural turn encouraged scholars to examine how individuals made sense of their world through shared symbols and practices, laying the groundwork for later studies of legal consciousness that investigated how ordinary people understood and experienced law in daily life.

Law and society scholars such as Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey revolutionized the study of legal experience in the 1990s through their focus on legal consciousness, which they defined as the ways ordinary people understand, use, and give meaning to law in their daily lives (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998). This approach was part of a broader movement that included Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns’s influential Law in Everyday Life (Reference Sarat and Kearns1993), which explored how legal meaning was constructed through social practice rather than formal pronouncement. Drawing from the cultural turn’s emphasis on meaning-making and symbolic interpretation, these scholars challenged traditional legal scholarship by examining how law operated as a lived cultural phenomenon rather than merely as formal doctrine. Their research revealed that legal consciousness consisted of complex cultural schemas through which people interpreted everyday encounters with legal authority, showing how law’s social power derived not only from coercive capacity but from its ability to shape how people understood themselves and their possibilities for action within society. Likewise, Sally Engle Merry’s pioneering ethnographic work provided crucial foundations for understanding legal consciousness through her detailed study of how working-class Americans navigated conflict and sought justice in their everyday lives (Reference Merry1990). She demonstrated how people developed distinct strategies for engaging with different forms of legal authority, revealing the complex ways individuals moved between formal legal institutions and informal community-based dispute resolution mechanisms.

In colonial legal history, we look for frameworks that help us comprehend how colonial authority was maintained not just through visible force but through documentary practices, administrative procedures and legal categorizations. Merry’s analysis of legal pluralism showed how multiple legal orders operated simultaneously within the same social space, forcing ordinary people to develop sophisticated understandings of when and how to deploy different types of legal resources depending on their particular circumstances and goals (Reference Merry1988). Merry’s Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Reference Merry2000) demonstrated how American legal institutions systematically displaced Native Hawaiian customary law while forcing Hawaiians to navigate between traditional and colonial legal systems. Her analysis revealed how law functioned as an instrument of cultural colonization, transforming concepts of property and community authority while Hawaiians creatively resisted through selective engagement with both legal orders.

Others like Elizabeth Mertz (Reference Mertz2007), Carol Greenhouse (Reference Greenhouse1986) and Lila Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod1998) continue to show how societies use law to manage social transformation across the world – law as lived experience. This concept has helped historians studying colonialism, empire, and cross-cultural encounters to understand how indigenous legal systems, colonial law, religious law and customary practices operated simultaneously in historical contexts. Most importantly, historians seek ways to analyze how law shapes historical subjects’ possibilities for action and articulation. Building on this evolution, Law and Society approaches provide a fundamentally different way of theorizing historical change – one that understands law as constituting reality itself rather than merely reflecting or shaping society. Law establishes the parameters of visibility and articulation, determining what can be recognized and expressed. Through these mechanisms, law creates worlds.

In colonial contexts, law functions not as an abstract imported system but as an adaptive medium that both enables and constrains action. It configures environments while being reconfigured by them, flowing into existing structures while altering the landscape. Law’s effectiveness stems not primarily from overt force but from its capacity to normalize itself and render its operations unremarkable. Consider the difference between explicit and implicit forms of colonial power. For my second book project, Overflow: History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire, I look at the history of land reclamation in the British Empire – where legal jurisdictions are made concrete. A surveyor designating a shoreline as “Crown foreshore,” the area between high and low tides, which became contested legal territory due to its ambiguous status, appears benign compared to military presence. An official document extending authority across oceanic spaces seems less coercive than armed force. This apparent neutrality enhanced the effectiveness of legal mechanisms. But the legal enclosure of the foreshore facilitated colonial seizure of all coastal land across Empire. Despite that, law’s influence operates through its presentation as procedural rather than coercive.

A Law and Society approach makes explicit how procedural elements, such as administrative systems, documentation requirements and jurisdictional definitions serve as conduits for authority in themselves. A case from Singapore in 1875, which I explore in my first book, illustrates this dynamic (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020: 33–56). A small community of Arab merchants – comprising only 50 families in a colony of over 97,000 residents – petitioned the British colonial government regarding Islamic marriage and divorce practices. These conservative merchants were concerned that local religious officials were granting divorces to their wives during their commercial travels. The response is noteworthy: the British administration, typically reluctant to intervene in religious matters, established the Mohamedan Marriage Ordinance of 1880, centralizing Islamic religious affairs under bureaucratic oversight. Through this petition, the Arab merchants redirected legal authority, simultaneously diminishing local religious officials’ power while limiting colonial intervention through appeals to religious legitimacy.

This change in authority was accomplished without violence or mass mobilization, but through strategic engagement with colonial legal structures. These merchants recognized that colonial governance had transformed sovereignty into a fragmented set of capacities that could be accessed through legal channels. Consider also imperial land reclamation projects. Contemporary Hong Kong’s waterfront, with its modern infrastructure, obscures the legal processes that transformed coastal zones into fixed property. Invisible are the Chinese merchants who invested in reclamation projects but were excluded from decision-making regarding the resulting land, and how the Praya Reclamation Scheme fundamentally altered both the physical and legal geography of colonial Hong Kong? (Ng Reference Ng2018).

In Hong Kong, engineering projects created new land literally while judicial decisions established new property rights since the 1830s when it became a British Crown Colony. This process went beyond creating real estate; it reconfigured sovereign space and established new ontological categories. What makes these legal transformations significant is their eventual invisibility. Singapore’s current waterfront bears no evident traces of the legal contests that determined its use and access. Law becomes integrated into the landscape, its constructed nature forgotten as the border between land and sea appears natural rather than legally produced. Law’s most significant achievement is rendering contingent outcomes as inevitable developments, transforming power relations into apparent facts.

This is why Law and Society approaches offer a new way of theorizing in historical scholarship: they denaturalize what appears given, in a way sensitizing us to change in power relations. They reveal how Western legal concepts such as property and sovereignty, presented as universal phenomena were specific impositions that encountered alternative legal epistemologies. They challenge the notion that law stands outside society rather than constitutes it. By employing Law and Society approaches, historians can recover these previously invisible dynamics.

How exactly do these approaches provide new theoretical frameworks for historical analysis? In at least three crucial ways. First, they shift our understanding of historical agency by revealing how marginalized subjects strategically navigated legal systems. Second, they reconceptualize power as operating through capillary networks of documentation rather than solely through centralized authority. Third, they reframe how we understand historical transformation itself – not as sudden ruptures but as gradual reconfigurations of legal categories and relationships that sometimes creep on us surreptitiously.

The theoretical implications are substantial. Law does not merely govern identities, spaces and temporalities – it creates them. Legal documents do not simply record time; they produce it by establishing precedent and constraining future possibilities. Law does not only regulate space; it fabricates it by transforming fluid zones into fixed territories. It determines what constituted a valid claim and establishes the framework through which claims can be articulated.

When Arab merchants in Dutch Java employed powers of attorney to maintain family connections across the Indian Ocean, they were creating alternative geographies of belonging that transcended imperial boundaries (Yahaya Reference Yahaya2020: 57–81). On the other hand, when coastal communities found their traditional fishing areas reclassified as “Crown foreshore,” they experienced not only resource loss but an epistemological rupture – a fundamental reordering of their relationship to place and livelihood.

The Law and Society approach provides an alternative mapping of power – one that traces how authority operates through documentation, how resistance emerges within plural systems, and how structural violence becomes encoded in procedure. It presents the past not as determined territory but as contested space still being defined. In conclusion, Law and Society approaches transform the discipline of history by changing how we perceive historical change itself. By examining how legal mechanisms constituted reality, these approaches modify the epistemological foundation upon which we recognize transformation. Our scholarly responsibility is to examine this appearance of inevitability and reveal the contingent nature of what seems fixed.