Socio‐legal Scholarship in Canada: A Review of the Field
| Author | Harry Arthurs,Annie Bunting |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2014.00682.x |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 41, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2014
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 487±99
Socio-legal Scholarship in Canada: A Review of the Field
Harry Arthurs* and Annie Bunting**
This article is the second in an occasional series dealing with the
development, current status, and future of socio-legal studies in
selected countries. It follows Kim Economides's review of socio-legal
studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
INTRODUCTION: DEFINING THE FIELD ± WHAT DO WE MEAN BY
SOCIO-LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP?
Legal academics tend to define socio-legal scholarship negatively ± scholar-
ship that is not doctrinal. However, this definition tells us more about
sectarianism within the legal academy than about the field itself. Social
scientists and humanists, by contrast, are likely to adopt a more positive
definition: socio-legal research investigates legal institutions, processes,
cultures, texts, experiences, and outcomes from a variety of external per-
spectives. Undergraduate and graduate programmes in law and society in
Canada, for example, define themselves more explicitly as programmes for
the interdisciplinary study of law ± though interdisciplinarity is far from a
settled concept. And importantly, the Canadian Law and Society Association
(CLSA) describes itself inclusively as `a group of scholars from many
disciplines who are interested in the place of law in social, political,
economic and cultural life'.
1
Faut de mieux, we have borrowed this latter
ecumenical and open-ended self-definition by socio-legal scholars of their
487
*Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto,
Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada
harthurs@osgoode.yorku.ca
** Law and Society Programme, York University, 4700 Keele Street,
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada
abunting@yorku.ca
We would like to sincerely thank Mariful Alam, Elisabeth Roy-Trudel, and Emily
Lockhart for their excellent research assistance and collaboration on this project, and
Osgoode Hall Law School of York University for financial support.
1 CLSA, at
ß2014 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2014 Cardiff University Law School
To continue reading
Request your trial