Being Social in Socio-Legal Studies
1995; Wiley; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1410707
ISSN1467-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoAlthough this may be an intensely secular occasion, I will begin with a seasonal text for Advent from the Gospel according to Luke. In chapter one, there is the rhapsodic prophecy of Zacharias on the birth of his son John the Baptist where, in a verse of piercing and now melancholy beauty, verse 78, he attributes all that the Baptist will achieve to 'the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring on high hath visited us'. It is the absence of such a visitation, the absence of transcendent origin, in the world of socio-legal studies that I want to talk about. To be more precise, the uncertainty of identity in socio-legal studies is it social, or is it legal, or some mixture of these? has not been relieved by the constant search for some resolving presence, for something that will enable us to say at last what it is. In my argument, the quest for identity is impelled, not by the experience of a presence which we assiduously seek to reveal, but by the intimation of an absence which we thereby seek to avoid.' The assumption and pursuit of a presence that is to be found or recovered serve to fill the void at the core of the social and the legal. Since this pursuit of presence is not to the point, it can never be successful. Debates about the social and the legal in, and out of, socio-legal studies are thence in-terminable. Perhaps then a touch of ennui, even resignation, in recent assessments of the field becomes understandable. To draw on a survey by Thomas, some leading advocates of socio-legal studies now employ a strategy of confession and avoidance: the field is there but its 'definition' is attended with unspecific and unrelieved 'problems', 'difficulty', and a general absence of clarity in its 'lines of demarcation'.2 There is also a kind of happy positivism which
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