The Fourth Act in Socio-Legal Scholarship: Playing With Law on the Sociological Stage

The emerging narrative of law as a social phenomenon—as opposed to a legal phenomenon— presents pressing questions about what it means to take a sociological approach to law, why the discipline needs retelling from a sociological vantage point, and how this relatively new narrative can be told. I consider these “baseline” questions of socio-legal studies through a careful dissection of Roger Cotterrell’s assertion that a sociological understanding of legal ideas “consistently and permanently addresses the need to reinterpret law systematically and empirically as a social phenomenon.” By deconstructing Cotterrell’s statement, I will explain how a sociological approach provides a vital analytical lens through which to appreciate not only how law works (succeeds or fails) in different social contexts but also how law acts as a social phenomenon. Drawing upon historical and contemporary research examples, I argue that law must be studied as if on a sociological “stage” upon which different actors perform and experience social “acts” within the “theater” of the legal discipline. I will explain why a sociological approach to law is vital for understanding how each “act”—each social phenomenon of law—plays out in the context of other phenomena, including globalization, transitional justice, and the evolution of socio-legal scholarship itself.