Foundations of Law & Society
What is Law and Society?
Compliance or deterrence is subject to people’s perception of the potential punishment – whether legally with fines or loss of freedom, socially from family or the network, or else – for breaking the law results in different actions. These individual perceptions might lead one to steal from the shop, while another to not to. It is all subject tot their personal perception – that might be shaped by moral inhibition, social bonding, social network and location within that, self-control, hyperbolic time discounting, emotional and pharmacological arousal, and generally, the individual’s decision-making competency (Piquero et al.). These differences in us are common sense, as we are not robots, we are different, regardless what this individuum in us is shaped by.
Also, law & society theories are being questioned because they are not solid enough not to be. As Santos has pointed out, through the centuries, law has undergone three metamorphosis: from the child of the 17th-18th century when natural laws were formulated, through the 19th century’s lion of negativity phase, resisting social demand in politics, to the 20th century ‘law as a camel’ phase. This camelization is about law’s resistance to values and beliefs of social and political forces has fallen down, it became often contradictory, hence a camel. For this to happen, the most salient tool, Santosa finds, is the welfare state. To get out of this phase, Santos offered legal pluralism in the form of mapping. But legal pluralism is all about the different types of laws: some can be constitutional, some can be unwritten local norms. Therefore, Santos offers a conclusion that the solution is to understand that there are many different laws, social perceptions and groups or individuals, with different understanding of all those laws. D’Souza’s geo-historical sense of law also confirms that there are – colonial – differences in the citizen-social group-law relations. This also reconfirms the fact that there are – naturally – differences across individuals and societies when it comes to their relation to the different written or unwritten laws. This might be due to colonial backgrounds, or other geographic and historic reasons. The result is the same: naturally occurring differences in the relationship between law and society.
Looking at these conclusions, we can confirm that law and society researchers are not “any different from all sorts of other people, including lawyers, politicians, ordinary citizens…who sense the presence of social forces in the legal system.” Both, law and law’s relation to citizens and societies is relative to individual citizens’ perception. Therefore, it is natural that these citizens shape the law, the social forces are in the legal system, because their interaction with the law varies. And this includes everyone: all lawyers, politicians and ordinary citizens have an individual understanding, and they act with the law accordingly. Ordinary people in their everyday life, politicians in their work, and lawyers in the court room. But naturally, all do it their own way, based on their own understanding of law and their relation to it.
At the end of the day though, just like in any topic, one can pick papers that will support his/her position, just like I was able to pick the weeks which support the argument I want to make. In real life scenarios, people do the same: they have an opinion about laws, and look for actions, communities, mobilization opportunities that will support that opinion about the particular law. As we are different individuals, with different opinions, regardless what that opinion is shaped by from our surroundings. Isn’t that commonsense?
Hence, if law and society wants to stay relevant, in my opinion it should be more focused on understanding this commonsense of differences across societies, laws and individuals. Deep dive into what makes one decide to make a law, to follow that law and to shape that law through mobilization. Although generalizability is a wrong technique in this case, as these individual decision-making processes happen at the very micro level, there are now officially 8 billion people on the planet and there must be some trends among two or few individuals in their logic. This aligns mostly with Critical Legal Studies’ goals to focus on social, economic, psychological and historical legal decision-making (that involves individuals), and ‘to demonstrate the indeterminacy of legal doctrine and show how any given set of legal principles can be used to yield competing or contradictory results’ (The Bridge, n.d.). Since we are different and laws have different meanings to us, contradiction is inevitable.
References
The Bridge (n.d.). Critical Legal Studies Movement. The Bridge. https://cyber.harvard.edu/ bridge/CriticalTheory/critical2.htm
Comments
Post a Comment