The crafty power of text: methods for a sociology of legislative drafting
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Author | EMILY GRABHAM |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12369 |
DOI: ./j ols.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The crafty power of text: methods for a sociology
of legislative drafting
EMILY GRABHAM
Kent Law School, Eliot College,
University of Kent, Canterbury,CT NS,
England
Correspondence
Emily Grabham, Kent Law School, Eliot
College, University of Kent, Canterbury,
CT NS, England
Email: e.grabham@kent.ac.uk
Abstract
This article proposes that socio-legal scholars study
statutes and legislative drafting on their own terms. Leg-
islative drafting may seem to havelittle relevance within
approaches that emphasize law’s wider social effects.
Yet statutes can be defamiliarized, and the dynamics
through which they are drafted better understood. This
can help statutes to answer for their legal and social
power and also assist scholars working in law and other
disciplines to grasp the distinctiveness of legal doctrine.
Drawing on findings from my current research, I argue
that sociologies of legislative drafting could contribute
to, and be informed by, two contemporary debates:
first, the status of legal technical expertise, and second,
the aesthetics of law. Unpicking these thickly knotted
ontologies of law and draftingcould be achieved through
historical, ethnographic, and experimental visual meth-
ods. These methods potentially help us to tackle some-
thing akin to an ‘obviation of legal form’ through which
statutory text is seen to be distinct from, and subservient
to, law’s legal and political substance.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© The Authors. Journalof Law and Society publishedby John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University (CU).
J. Law Soc. ;(Suppl. ):S–S. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols S1
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