Handbook

In their practical day-to-day activities, lawyers and citizens take, and must take, much for granted, both about society in which they work and live and about its legal order. Lawyers practice within established legal systems, with more or less settled institutions, techniques, traditions and rules. Citizens live, and the laws operate, in societies in which specific social arrangements, structures, roles, expectations and conceptions of what is possible and what is right, are widely held and shape our views about law and about society.  Customarily, most of us think within these categories and arrangements, rather than about them. Theoretical investigation looks beneath what we all too often take for granted, to see what accounts for it, how it works, and how it changes. 

Social theory is a particular way of asking theoretical questions, which tries to explain why things are as they are by examining the social practices and institutions that shape the way that people live.  To study law and social theory is to explore theoretical issues that arise when we see law as one part of this broader social context. 

Some of the questions that we address in the course include: what social functions are played by legal systems, and the modern legal system in particular? How does law intersect with other social systems, practices, and forms of power?  How, for example, is the legal system influenced by the economy, and how does it shape the economy in turn?  What is the relationship between the legal system and political actors, such as the state, bureaucracy, classes and social movements?  How does law shape, and how is it influenced by, socially dominant ways of thinking, such as ideology, rationality, or beliefs about class, gender, and race?  What drives change in the legal system?  Is it, for example, the practices of lawyers, politicians, or social movements?  Is it the evolution of ideas? Or economic imperatives? 

We will explore these questions in both an historical and contemporary context.  We will examine the work of the foundational thinkers in the tradition of social theory, such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, who were responding to the massive social, economic, scientific and intellectual changes of the nineteenth century.  Their work continues to provide insight into the relationship between law and society, because the contemporary world, has inherited many of the ideas and institutions that came to dominate society in their time, including the market economy, democracy, and liberal individualism.  The course also engages with more contemporary theorists whose work responds to the changing social and legal landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.  This may include the work of Michel Foucault, systems theory, feminist criticism, or theories of biopolitics.  We will draw on these thinkers, not only to reflect on the themes of the course, but to think about pressing issues, such as the impact of neoliberalism and globalisation on the law, the treatment of refugees, emergency politics and constitutional democracy, and the legal and political response to climate change.  

Studying theories of law and society will hopefully lead us beyond our original, and usually quite unreflective views of what is important in law, what role it plays in society, whose interests it serves, what causes legal change, and how important law is. In probing these questions, we might come to confirm, modify or abandon our original assumptions; we will always, however, find these assumptions are more problematic, controversial and puzzling than they appeared at first to be.