Editors’ Note

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12307

Editors’ Note

Ahallmark of sociolegal work has been assessing how actors

anticipate what legal officials might do and how multiple officials

work with law across settings. People strategize or change tactics

where they can, find alternative venues for disputes, and draw

upon cultural meanings when caught in legal tangles.

The articles in this issue take insights from sociolegal studies

to interpret encounters with legal officials and to examine the

framing of key problems as legal issues. The range of topics and

methodologies is wide, but all of the authors engage with encounters

between legal processes, administrative practices, and normative

systems.

The article by Anette Bringedal Houge and Kjersti Lohne

takes up the topic of conflict-related sexual violence and the

criminal law fight against impunity. The authors examine central

imageries of victims and perpetrators across interstate diplomacy

and human rights advocacy to argue that such framing narrows

and contains political maneuverability in the face of the harms of

this sexual violence.

Florian Grisel’s contribution proposes an alternative narrative of

globalization in commercial arbitration. Grisel revisits the sociology

of international commercial arbitration, arguing that a critical trans-

formative period for international commercial arbitration took place

between the 1950s and 1970s, when a group of individuals, “secant

marginals,” emerged as leading arbitrators at the International

Chamber of Commerce. The cooperative (rather than competitive)

interface that resulted created the conditions necessary for the

emergence of a new transnational legal profession.

The study of legal pluralism has long raised questions about

where and how different legal systems protect people: customary

law can promise connection to community but that can obscure

problems for individuals. Even different historical legacies can

lead to similar issues, as Janine Ubink and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks

demonstrate in their analysis of how traditional courts dispense

justice in Malawi and South Africa.

Law & Society Review, Volume 51, Number 4 (2017)

V

C2017 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

753