Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society
| Author | Carl Makin |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221096555 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Overall, Dispute Resolution in China is an exemplary study in both Chinese law and
sociolegal studies. It speaks to not only legal academics but also social scientists inter-
ested in formal and informal mechanisms of civil and commercial dispute resolution, par-
ticularly disputes with a cross-border dimension, and more generally, how the Chinese
legal system works in practice in this interactive ecology. As studies of Chinese law
get increasingly niched and specialised in specific areas and topics, Gu’s ecological
approach that connects different components of this complex system and examines
their interactions sets this book apart as a milestone in the field.
SIDA LIU
University of Toronto
ORCID iD
Sida Liu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5147-0024
MARIANA VALVERDE, KAMARI CLARKE, EVE DARIAN-SMITH & PRABHA KOTISWARAN
(eds), The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society. Routledge, 1st edn 2021, pp. 274, ISBN
9780367234249, £190 (hbk).
Law and society scholarship now constitutes a vast, deep and diverse body of literature.
Designing or teaching an introductory module to this subject can be a difficult task, par-
ticularly when students have previously engaged largely with doctrinal or black-letter
approaches to legal study. This new collection brought together by Mariana Valverde
and other well-known law and society professors based in the USA, Canada and the
United Kingdom, sets out in its inside cover its aim to provide a “comprehensive, and
truly global, overview of the main approaches and themes within law and society schol-
arship or socio-legal studies.”In their introductory remarks, the editors make clear their
desire for this book to be used to expose law and social science students to law and
society scholarship. However, in a departure from handbook orthodoxy, this collection
of papers does not begin with a historical account of the field. Instead, it takes as its start-
ing point the cutting-edge issues of our time and deconstructs or re-analyses many famil-
iar global or historical phenomena using the varied tools, lenses and literatures prevalent
within law and society scholarship.
In terms of structure, the book is split relatively neatly into two parts. Part I focuses on
contemporary perspectives and approaches to socio-legal study. Here, the various authors
consider modes of analysis and theoretical approaches that characterise current global law
and society scholarship. Part II moves to what the editors label “sites of engagement”,
where the focus turns to the variety of locations, social structures and events that law
and society scholarship has the potential to analyse. The split between Part I and Part
II is quite uneven, with most of the content in the volume contained in Part II. This, it
is suggested, reflects the inherent difficulty involved in separating modes of analysis
from sites of analysis. Indeed, Part II tells us as much about the methods and theoretical
approaches adopted by the authors as Part I.
798 Social & Legal Studies 31(5)
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