Book Review: Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods
| Author | Ben Yong |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920962549 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
NAOMI CREUTZFELDT, MARC MASON and KIRSTEN MCCONNACHIE (eds), Routledge
Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods. Oxon: Routledge, 2020, pp. 442, ISBN
9781138592902, £190 (hbk).
The Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods (hereafter, ‘Handbook’) is
different. The editors set out their goals in the introductory chapter: they choose not to
get lost in tedious definitional debates – is the proper term law and society, law in
society, the sociology of law, or law and sociology? And so on. They do note, however,
that ‘[a]t its broadest, the field of socio-legal studies might be defined as a way of seeing,
of recognising the mutually constitutive relationship between law and society’ (p. 4) and
that socio-legal studies (hereafter ‘SLS’) has been ‘a magpie discipline’ (p. 6). Given the
sheer variety of topics and approaches that could fall under such a definition, they instead
choose to focus on the ‘doing’ of SLS. There are plenty of texts on theory; but few telling
what ‘socio-legal projects look like from the inside’ (p. 5). This is meant to be a hand-
book which is practical.
And so what we get is diversity and variety, practicality and personal reflection. Of
the 28 chapters, two-thirds have women as authors or co-authors; and there are contri-
butions from scholars at different stages in their career: from PhD students to early and
mid-career academics, to more renowned scholars. The aim is to give readers a sense of
the broad spectrum of SLS. The Handbook is divided into three sections: ‘approaching
socio-legal studies’, ‘disc iplinary and theoretical relat ionships’ and ‘methodologic al
choices’, with each section roughly having 10 chapters each.
‘Approaching socio-legal studies’ contains chapters about the history and develop-
ment of SLS (Creutzfeldt, Menkel-Meadow), and then practical matters that all socio-
legal scholars face – so (among others) there are chapters on the process of conducting
socio-legal research (Webley), the uses and abuses of SLS (Menkel-Meadow), ethics
(Brooks), impact (Murray), the process of writing (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos) and
doing theory (Davies). For myself, I would have appreciated a more in-depth and ana-
lytical discussion of SLS, and some of the tensions that pervade it (e.g., between obscur-
ity and relevance, or scholarship and impact; between disciplinary cohesiveness and the
desire for the richness of interdisciplinarity). Creutzfeldt’s chapter in particular on the
development of SLS in the US and UK attempts to cover some of this: it looks at the
institutionalisation of SLS, and then the paths that individual scholars took. But it is
tentative, and left me wanting more – it lacked the depth of (say) Patricia Ewick and
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(2) 327–337
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663920962549
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