On the Emerging Maturity of Law and Society: An Introduction

• Author: Austin Sarat/Patricia Ewick
• Profession: William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law/Professor of Sociology at Clark University
• Pages: 13-22

Introduction

On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Law and Society Association initiated

the Project on the Second Half Century. Representing a relatively young field of

scholarship – at least compared to its constituent disciplines – the Association

paused to look back to its origins, mark its progress and chart a path forward. These

soundings entailed, among other things: soliciting proposals from junior scholars

about directions the field might take in the next fifty years; organizing a series of

50th Anniversary Roundtables at LSA’s 2014 meetings; and posting a selective

sample of essays, presidential addresses and journal articles published over the last

50 years reviewing and reflecting on the field of law and society. That sample

included 73 pieces, on average about one and a half reviews for every year of the

Association’s existence.

This level of self‐scrutiny may reflect the precariousness and uncertainty that

mark the life of an interdisciplinary field committed to inclusiveness. From the

beginning law and society was a “big tent” field. According to Garth and Sterling

(1998) the Law and Society Association was founded when legal realists challenged

legal formalism. The realist challenge was based on the insistence that, given the

indeterminacy of law, legal knowledge must go beyond doctrine and include

empirical studies of law in action. This challenge within the legal academy coincided

with the work of a small group of sociologists who, marginalized by orthodox soci-

ology’s drift toward quantitative approaches and “by the precarious position of law

within sociology,” defected from the American Sociological Association and

established the Law and Society Association (Garth and Sterling 1998). The marriage

of legal realists and social scientists brought together two groups at odds with

theorthodoxy of their respective home disciplines and intent on constructing an

interdisciplinary study of law and society.

On the Emerging Maturity

of Law andSociety

An Introduction

Patricia Ewick and Austin Sarat