History of law and society

To understand how far the field of law and society has come and the ways it stands to build theory in the disciplines, we must take our own history seriously. We must, in other words, “make sense of the generation[s] that preceded us” (Garth and Sterling Reference Garth and Sterling1998: 410). Studying the history of the field of law and society is revelatory for at least three reasons.

First, law and society began as a mid-20th-century revival of a neglected or marginalized tradition in classical social theory that investigated the vast range of law’s functions in social ordering. In this context of intellectual revival, the field of law and society was born not once, but many times and in many places. The US long applied its centrifugal force on the field, but national organizations in law and society were founded separately in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands as early as the 1940s (Clark 2007). Scholars in those places were contending with their countries’ experiences of imperialism and political violence. Scholars in Canada, India, and Indonesia, among other places, also created their own national law and society associations. Although these people rarely met one another, they were united by their desire to study law beyond its texts. In 1962, two years before the 1964 incorporation of the LSA, an international group of sociologists met and formed the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, which continues to exist within the International Sociological Association.

Second, with few exceptions, the earliest days of law and society focused more on improving the law than on improving social theory. This was true in and out of the US. In their study of the founding of the LSA, Garth and Sterling (Reference Garth and Sterling1998) explain that the association’s founders debated whether law or social science would set the field’s terms of analysis, but the field quickly became “tilted in favor of law” (Id.: 461). Nearly all early presidents of the LSA were law professors. The LSR’s early editors wanted the journal to look “like a law review,” including with student editors (Id.: 426). Its articles had the progressive, optimistic, and instrumentalist imprint of their US law-professor authors, who hoped that activists and states alike would use the law to alleviate poverty, combat discrimination, and address problems of crime and injustice. Private philanthropy also drew the field’s attention to law over theory. Foundations like Ford and Russell Sage that were concerned with US social and political conditions funded early law and society work that incorporated social science into law, rather than the other way around.

Third, the founders of the law and society field in the US did not represent a real diversity of professional backgrounds, even by mid-20th-century standards. With a few exceptions, they were either law professors or sociologists.Footnote ³ They were united by the view that “The social sciences can provide a usable epistemology for the examination of meaningful legal questions” (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1965: 1). But they were also divided over the LSA’s purpose, whether it should become a “primary association, in place of a disciplinary affiliation” or, as some of the social scientists wanted, a space to test their arguments about legal thought, texts, or disputes before taking them back into their home disciplines (Garth and Sterling Reference Garth and Sterling1998: 447). Together, they worked to create space for scholars to study law as one of the many ubiquitous forms of social ordering, separate from but alongside other forms of ordering like the family, the market, religion, and the state.

Law was certainly the center of disciplinary gravity in law and society’s earliest days, but the social sciences also continued to matter. The LSA’s annual meetings from 1964 until 1975 occurred in conjunction with other associations’ professional meetings – in law but also in anthropology, sociology, and political science. The LSA’s original board of trustees also included members elected by professional associations in anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology (Id.: 418). The LSR’s origins can be traced not to its first issue in 1966 but to a 1965 supplemental issue on law and society in a sociology journal, Social Problems (Ball and Wheeler Reference Ball and Wheeler1965: iii). The introduction essay of the supplement declared the founding of law and society as “the birth of a new subdiscipline within American sociology” (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1965: 1).Footnote ⁴

The 1970s and 1980s saw more involvement from US social scientists in law and society, but since the 1990s, law and society has had “fewer direct ties to the disciplines” (Garth and Sterling Reference Garth and Sterling1998: 414). Since that time, the field strengthened and disciplined itself – growing its autonomy, setting its own boundaries, and developing its own markers of legitimacy and professional pathways.Footnote ⁵ Key universities and organizations in different times and places acted as the field’s intermediaries and balance points – the LSA, the American Bar Foundation, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Oxford, and the Australian National University, among others. Meanwhile, non-US membership in the LSA nearly tripled from 15% in 1980 to more than 40% in 2025 (Mather Reference Mather2003: 265).Footnote ⁶ All but one of the six presidents of the LSA in the decade between 2015 and 2025 were or are US-based law professors.Footnote ⁷ This may be yet another signal of the long narrowing of law and society in the US into a subdiscipline of law, as law and society has become in the UK, Germany, Canada, South Africa, and in many places across Asia and Latin America.Footnote ⁸

The focus on improving legal work or legal teaching does not indicate a reduction in the field’s innovations, nor in its relevance to the social sciences. Ideas from law and society saturate the disciplines and build social theory (Savelsberg et al. Reference Savelsberg, Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron and Silbey2016). Law and society scholarship continues to be excerpted in US legal casebooks and taught in law schools (Tennison Reference Tennison2024). Sociologists have long observed lawyers, legal cases, and legal consciousness in order to study organizations (see, e.g., Edelman Reference Edelman2016; Selznick Reference Selznick1949), social movements (see, e.g., Barclay et al. Reference Barclay, Bernstein and Marshall2009), gender (see, e.g., Ballakrishnen Reference Ballakrishnen2021), justice (see, e.g., Sandefur Reference Sandefur2008), and immigration (see, e.g., Armenta Reference Armenta2017; Menjívar and Abrego Reference Menjívar and Abrego2012). Political scientists have brought law and society into their studies of courts to explain people’s interactions with state institutions. This includes work in US political history (see, e.g., Francis Reference Francis2014; Zackin Reference Zackin2013) and across African, Asian, European, and Latin American contexts (see, e.g., González-Ocantos Reference González-Ocantos2016; Massoud Reference Massoud2013; Reference Massoud2021; Moustafa Reference Moustafa2007; Reference Moustafa2018; Pavone Reference Pavone2022; Taylor Reference Taylor2023). Anthropologists (see, e.g., Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse1986; Merry Reference Merry2006; Pirie Reference Pirie2021) and historians (see, e.g., Sharafi Reference Sharafi2014) have also brought law and society to bear on their studies of human rights, the rule of law, and imperialism. In these and other studies, our field has not only challenged hierarchy but also revealed how “The meaning of law is not intrinsic to statutes or cases, but rather is dependent on extralegal factors; that the form, interpretation, enforcement, and impact of law [can] reinforce the extant social structure; and that the sources of law are … socially derived” (Seron et al. Reference Seron, Coutin and Meeusen2013: 290).

Organization of the symposium

With this history of the field in mind, this symposium reconnects law and society scholars with some of the disciplines that helped to give birth to and raise up the field of law and society. The authors of the following essays work in law and society and in five of the major fields – anthropology, law, history, politics, and sociology – that developed it. I invited the authors to consider what law and society offers their fields in return and, in particular, the following set of questions:

The five articles that follow showcase the authors’ responses to these questions. In the first article, Jeffrey Omari, an anthropologist and law professor, learned that speaking the normative language of the law, the descriptive and theoretical language of anthropology, and the methodological language of positionality – being intellectually multilingual – led him to see the value of engaging with multiple audiences and of studying the law from the bottom up and the top down.

To Nurfadzilah Yahaya, an historian of the British Empire and Southeast Asia, law and society offers an “alternative mapping of power” that operates “through capillary networks of documentation,” not just through centralized authority. Law and society reveals to historians, in Yahaya’s words, how law “creates worlds [and] becomes integrated into the landscape, its constructed nature forgotten.”

Lynette J. Chua, a Berkeley-trained socio-legal scholar and a law professor in Singapore, argues that empirical data and descriptions can help legal scholars hoping to change the law to refocus their lens on law’s limits – as well as on their own limits. Law and society, Chua shows, helps to uncover legal scholars’ own “taken-for-granted” assumptions, concepts, and practices about law’s power.

Renée Cramer, who explains the “groundlessness” that some people feel in political science, learned in law and society that she could approach ideas comparatively and think in an “integrated, holistic, and deeply contextual way” about data. Cramer contrasts political science – which grew “out of a desire to consolidate and make certain democratic … power” – from law and society, which emerged “out of [a] critique … of the limitations of that power.”

Finally, Asad L. Asad, a sociologist, sees the law and society sensibility as one that is both empirically grounded and theoretically ambitious because it treats law as many things at once – a social structure, a system of rules, a terrain of struggle, and a site of meaning-making. Asad’s lasting observation – that “explaining the social world and evaluating its fairness are not mutually exclusive enterprises” – closes the symposium.

Collectively, the articles in this symposium underscore the importance of building social theory with law and society. To do this, we must, in former LSA President Malcolm M. Feeley’s words, continue to “embrace a broad and jurisprudentially robust conception of law” (Feeley Reference Feeley2007: 760). This means not only continuing our public scholarship but also working toward more precise development of theory. Doing so is not easy, and it involves asking tough questions about law’s embeddedness in society, about how our own backgrounds, experiences, and professional privileges shape our work (Chua and Massoud Reference Chua and Massoud2024), and about “the politics that often underlies socio-legal analysis” (Choudhury Reference Choudhury2025: 16).

This symposium is part of a broader conversation in law and society about how law attends to power, and I hope the contributions that follow will spur work on law and society’s influence on other fields, including economics, philosophy, geography, feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, religion, and psychology, among others.

Toward law and society as sanctuary

Law and society is sometimes discussed as a field – a reaction to the disciplining of the disciplines – and sometimes as a movement in which scholars use empirical data to challenge injustices and embedded privileges. In addition to being a field and a movement, law and society is also a sanctuary. A sanctuary is a place of refuge or safety, especially for those who feel unwelcome outside it. In early modern Europe, the sanctuary was a sacred space, usually inside a church, where a fugitive would be immune from the law that was out to get them.

Today, law and society offers a space for scholars unsatisfied with any single discipline’s ability to answer questions about the legal, political, and social world. But sanctuaries are not permanent spaces. When people stay too long, or when they build walls too high, the sanctuary risks becoming a castle that separates those on the inside from those on the outside. Such a separation can protect those on the inside from those on the outside, but it can also kill meaningful conversations between them, replicating the very problems that law and society scholars have found in the law.

These challenges that this essay introduces are not new. But they serve as an invitation for all of us to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship. It is an invitation to continue to study the law – as the legal anthropologist Sally Falk Moore (1924–2021) said shortly before her death – “as something living that goes on and on” and beyond any text (Morrill et al. Reference Morrill, Edelman, Fang and Greenspan2020: 108). And it is an invitation to consider the many shades of sanctuary in law and society.