Editors' Comments

• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12275
• Published date: 01 June 2017

Editors’ Comments

Good scholarship can nurture understanding and humane

ways of engaging with one another. We offer the articles in this

issue in the spirit of civil discussion of how we know what we

know, and what we see when we look. At our best, scholars share

a commitment to learning and a curiosity about how people live

with the law. The structure of research and its representation

now looks like a cool haven of civility when in public life we are

experiencing more heat with little light. However, the universities

in which so many of us work are not immune from this climate.

As we write, hate groups have been leafletting universities; hate-

ful, denigrating comments on academic social media are routine.

Civility may not be considered the most passionate of virtues, but

the practice of inclusion and respect in what we study and discuss

builds bridges we sorely need. If we share a common commit-

ment to admitting “I don’t know,” and to listening to one another

across our differences, we have a place to start.

The global spread of legal ideas and practices could not be

more visible in this issue.

No one would mistake law for the expression of the will of a

homogeneous community, once an ideal of what law could be. In

this issue, theorizing and the sites for empirical analysis are at

once local and international. Scholars write from universities

across the United States and Europe. Theorizing about what law

does and what it means builds connections across time, fields of

law, communities, and countries. As editors of the Law & Society

Review, we aim to increase the range of perspectives the journal

includes. This is a work in progress.

Fundamental research illuminates both local and global jus-

tice and injustice, all matters of concern for governing at any

level. None of the work published in this issue claims to speak

directly to what governing structures should do about problems.

Yet, understanding what law does, even in very particular set-

tings—say, what testifying means to people, how police officers

interact with citizens, why people participate in illegal markets

that leave them injured and still poor, why we punish the way we

do—counters a practice of imputing reasons to people, which

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