Website of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (ISA)

Call for Abstracts
14 April 2015 - 30 September 2015 24:00 GMT
Anyone interested in presenting a paper should submit an abstract on-line to a chosen session of RC/WG/TG

The abstract (300 words) must be submitted in English, French or Spanish.

Sessions in alphabetical order

Civil Justice and Dispute Resolution

Is There a “Quality of Justice” Standing Worldwide? Rights and Standards Across Cultural and National Borders

Lawyers in Society – Comparative Perspectives

Legal Education and Legal Professions

Legal Ethology

Legal Professions and Legal Education

Migrant Women in Distress and the Intersectionality of Law and Jurisprudence

RC12 Business Meeting

Resisting Oppression, Fighting Violence and Transforming the Law and Politics: Women’s Action Across the World

Social and Legal Systems

Studying Law and Society in the Context of Transdisciplinarity and Transnationality

The Futures We Want in Numbers: Searching Legal Indicators for a Better World

The Living Legacy of Leon Petrazycki’s Legal Realism for Sociology of Law and Other Social Sciences

Joint Session: Women Migrant Workers: Are They Protected?

Civil Justice and Dispute Resolution [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Luigi COMINELLI, The University of Milan, Italy, luigi.cominelli@unimi.it

Session in English

The session on civil justice and dispute resolution welcomes papers on any field connected to its broader subject, including but not limited to family law, criminal law, litigation, arbitration, mediation negotiation and and procedures in general. In recent years, there have been increasing interests in quantitative survey research on experiences of legal problems and access to justice in an unprecedented number of countries.
Drawing upon socio-legal research, we will discuss how experiences of legal problems and occurrences of disputes differ among countries, how legal machineries are used or not used to resolve disputes, how levels of satisfaction with outcomes differ, and research designs and quantitative analytical methods for future surveys. We will further explore socio-legal factors which effectively predict the use of lawyers and that of a court procedure.
Not only empirical papers based on surveys, field work or in-depth interviews but also theoretical papers are welcomed, provided that they are empirically based and oriented, even if they do not present original data, either quantitative or qualitative.

Is There a “Quality of Justice” Standing Worldwide? Rights and Standards Across Cultural and National Borders [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Luca VERZELLONI, Centro de Estudos Sociais, Portugal, luca.verzelloni@unibo.it
Daniela PIANA, University of Bologna, Italy, d.piana@unibo.it

Session in English

What is the justice that we want today? Which different conceptions of “quality of justice” have made their appearance over the last two decades in different parts of the world? Is there any convergent pattern either in the content of the “quality of justice” or in the method the quality is reached or measured? Are there methods and institutional mechanisms that proved more effective in building the organizational and professional capacities that are needed to ensure the “quality of justice”?
This panel session aims to reflect on the multiple consequences of the shifting from rights to standards, which is characterizing a large part of the judicial systems both in the north and in the south of the world. Policy makers, public opinion, academia and, in part, the members of judicial administrations are re-discovering that justice is a service, which needs to ensure certain standards of quality. The focus of the debate is shifting from procedures to products or, in other words, from the mechanisms to protect people’s rights to the definition of a set of standards to improve effectiveness and efficiency of the judicial service.
This “change of season”, which is developing in different times and forms from country to country, is gradually redefining the ways to conceive and administer the judicial systems. The panel session invites scholars and practitioners to take part in a dialogue that will focus on the characteristics of the standard-setting processes and, in general, on the new meanings of the concept of “quality of justice”.

Lawyers in Society – Comparative Perspectives [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Ole HAMMERSLEV, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, ohv@sam.sdu.dk

Session in English

Almost 30 years ago, Richard Abel and Philip Lewis published their three-volume Lawyers in Society. The project analysed lawyers comparatively, their histories and status by including issues such as gender, class, education, the state and lawyers’ relation to the market in both common law and civil law countries and it offered different approaches to understand lawyers.
Since their publication globalisation and neoliberal structures have affected lawyers’ work, organisation, education and demography. At one level, legal expertise and legal services become global, at another level transnational legal institutions and law develop and require new forms of legal expertise, while at a national level populations still need legal services.
How do globalization and neoliberal structures affect lawyers in different nation-states in terms of their work, specialization, stratification? How do lawyers and legal education produce expertise and legal products for new national and international markets? This session will deal with such emerging questions.

Legal Education and Legal Professions [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Rosemary AUCHMUTY, University of Reading, England, r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk

Session in English

Papers on Comparative Studies of Legal Professions are welcomed.

Legal Ethology [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Edoardo FITTIPALDI, University of Milan, Italy, edoardo.fittipaldi@unimi.it

Session in English

Much research is currently focused on morality and ethology and also on politics and ethology. Much less research is instead being done in the field of law and ethology. This may be due to the fact that the term “law” conveys the idea of a highly institutionalized linguistic phenomena (“to lay down”).
However, if one accepts a notion of law which includes informal social rules applied in a society, the legal relevance of many phenomena investigated by ethologists (which include family relationships, hierarchy, reciprocity and revenge, protection of possession, conflict resolution) becomes evident; it is evident that their human counterparts are considered as the object of legal sociology and legal anthropology.
Legal ethology can be addressed, among others, in two completely different (though not incompatible) ways. In one case, the social scientist searches for the biological roots of human legal phenomena. In the other one, the social scientist searches in non-human animals for forerunners of cultural phenomena that fully manifest themselves only in human animals, understood as somewhat anomalous animals.
Legal ethology can thus enrich both our understanding of human legal phenomena (by highlighting their biological roots) and of animal societies (by bringing into ethological studies an awareness of questions which are traditionally at the center of the study of legal phenomena among humans).
This session aims at discussing all issues related with legal ethology.

Legal Professions and Legal Education [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Rosemary AUCHMUTY, University of Reading, England, r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk

Session in English

Papers on legal professions and legal education are welcomed.

Migrant Women in Distress and the Intersectionality of Law and Jurisprudence [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Devanayak SUNDARAM, University of Madras, India, dsundaram@gmail.com

Session in English French Spanish

The session will focus on the following:

Gender in migration processes from a law and society perspective with an empirical focus,
An analysis of feminist jurisprudence over migration within the intersectionality of these.
An analysis of the autonomous and dependent immigration of women to countries abroad, as in the case of immigration to the Silicon Valley, domestic help in the Middle East; the nursing care professionals and policies that shape gender, race, migration, and their marginality within the perspectives of law and judiciary.
Legal policy in the context of the migrant women’s struggle to survive as in the case of migrant women/indentured women in South Africa.
Political compulsions that overlay the scarf/head dress practices of Islamic dress as of religious practice of the migrant women’s public domain within traditionalism and modernity and also looking as the other

RC12 Business Meeting [back to session list]

Session in English

Resisting Oppression, Fighting Violence and Transforming the Law and Politics: Women’s Action Across the World [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Barbara Giovanna BELLO, University of Milano, Italy, barbaragbello@gmail.com
Alexandrine GUYARD-NEDELEC, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, Alexandrine.Guyard-Nedelec@univ-paris1.fr

Session in English

Taking as a starting point the bottom-up instances of participation and resistance by women’s movements around the world, the session of the Working Group “Gender, Law and Society” of the RCSL aims at discussing how the laws and policies can be transformed, nurtured, deconstructed or improved in a way that they are responsive to women at the local level.
In line with the main topic of the Congress, this session welcomes papers strengthening the connections between international, European or local law and politics and their gender implications, inquiring into the role of women as social actors and their agency in the struggles in different scenarios (e.g. Arab Springs, postcolonial settings/countries, racially/ethnically segregated areas within metropolis, etc.), be they part of emancipatory movements, of cultural/religious/racial/ethnic/sexual or other minorities or acting as individuals. What potential or impact do women’s everyday practices of emancipation and coalitions have on the interconnections existing between their experience at the grassroots, politics, law and policy levels?
The organizers of the session welcome both theoretical elaborations on these themes and other aspects related to gender which fit the main topic of the Congress, and contributions embracing empirical research. In both cases, comparative or interdisciplinary approaches are particularly appreciated.

Social and Legal Systems [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Germano SCHWARTZ, Faculdade da Serra Gaúcha, Brazil, germano.schwartz@globo.com

Session in English Spanish

This session is devoted to issues related to the development of societies and its connections with different legal systems around the world. In this sense, following the thoughts of its founding father (Podgórecki), it aims to promote the discussion of the hidden (and not hidden) structures of the law as a phenomenon of society. This way, it is also connected with the general theme of the congress as it tries to establish how the description of the future by and with the legal system will have as a consequence if not a better society, at least a different society.

Studying Law and Society in the Context of Transdisciplinarity and Transnationality [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Julia DAHLVIK, University of Vienna, Austria, julia.dahlvik@univie.ac.at

Session in English

In reference to the general topic of the ISA conference, this panel asks which future we want – but also imagine, hope for, or fear – for the field of law and society, given, on the one hand, the global developments and challenges in the field and, on the other hand, existing national power structures and realities with regard to processes of law making (i.e. legislative processes), law implementation and legal practice.
Thus, for an adequate analysis, not only transnational but also transdisciplinary approaches seem indispensable if we want to study how society and law relate. The focus on Austria serves as an example for the German-speaking area and legal culture.

Transdisciplinarity: How can researchers from different fields cooperate not only with each other but also with practitioners in the field? What are possible contributions of transdisciplinary research with regard to the “struggles for a better world” from academic and practical perspectives?
Transnationality: What approaches are necessary to go beyond national comparisons to assess so-called global, supra-, inter-, trans-national as well as post-national realities? Are there methodological limits of comparative methods in general? What are possible and discernible impacts of global and transnational developments on socio-legal realities with regard to concepts of “a better world”?

The session organizer is interested in contributions that deal with transdisciplinarity and/or transnationality on a meta-level as well as examples of empirical research, which either adopt a trandisciplinary approach or cover transnational topics at the intersection of law and society.

The Futures We Want in Numbers: Searching Legal Indicators for a Better World [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
David RESTREPO-AMARILES, HEC Paris, France, restrepo-amariles@hec.fr

Session in English

Following on the premise of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission that “what we measure affects what we do”, this session addresses the topic of legal metrics and social change. The emergence of transnational legal indicators in the past ten years has made a notable impact on decision-making processes regarding law in society, and has become an area of socio-legal inquiry of contemporary relevance. Policy-makers in national and international organisations, managers in transnational corporations, and lawyers in global law firms are increasingly expected to make evidence-based decisions with the support of legal measures.
Is a given country’s legal system more inducing to socio-economic development relative to another? Does it protect adequately shareholders’ or workers’ rights? Does it ensure legal certainty and law enforcement?
We ask: What are the characteristics of the knowledge produced by existing national and transnational legal indicators (e.g. Doing Business Index, Global Rights Index, Rule of Law Index, National Justice Statistics), and how is it used to assess the performance of legal systems? What is lost or hidden when translating complex social phenomena into legal metrics? How does the use of (small or big) data change decision-making practices? Are current legal indicators adequate tools to measure socio-legal progress? Can they be improved?
We invite scholars to explore the topic from a variety of perspectives:

empirical and analytical insights into how indicators are used in practice and by whom;
theoretical insights into questions of legal phenomena’s commensurability;
methodological analyses of specific indicators’ design;
historical perspectives on legal indicators’ origins.

The Living Legacy of Leon Petrazycki’s Legal Realism for Sociology of Law and Other Social Sciences [back to session list]

Session Organizer(s)
Edoardo FITTIPALDI, University of Milan, Italy, edoardo.fittipaldi@unimi.it

Session in English

Leon Petrazycki is credited for being the unrecognized father of sociology of law (Podgórecki). His legal realism is still influential in Russia and Poland. Outside Slavic countries, though, Petrazycki’s legal realism is largely unknown, owing to the very few translations available in Western European languages. That is why scholars used to compare American Legal Realism with Scandinavian one, rather than also include Polish-Russian Legal Realism.
Finally, the editors (Pattaro and Roversi) of the 12th volume of the influential Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence have introduced the historiographical concept of Continental Legal Realism to comprise both European realisms. Moreover, in this treatise an extensive introduction is provided to the ideas not only of Petrazycki but also of his most faithful pupils Jerzy Lande and Max Lazerson.
Petrazycki’s legal realism characterizes itself, among others, for a multi-level approach to legal phenomena (psychological and sociological), for the adoption of a quasi-phenomenological method for devising scientific concepts, and for a sharp distinction of three possible approaches to legal phenomena: (1) psychosociological, (2) legal dogmatic and (3) legal political. Petrazycki’s conceptions have proven influential in anthropology (Malinowski, Kurczewski) and sociology (Sorokin, Timasheff, Gurvitch).
The goal of this session is not only to explore the Wirkungsgeschichte of Petrazycki’s legacy but also to compare and cross-fertilize it with classical phenomenology, Scandinavian legal realism, as well as with contemporary or classical approaches in sociology, anthropology, human ethology and psychology.

Joint Session [back to session list]

Click on the session title to read its description and the scheduled day/time.

Women Migrant Workers: Are They Protected?

Joint session of RC12 Sociology of Law [host committee] , RC31 Sociology of Migration and RC32 Women in Society

Website of the RCSL - ISA

http://rcsl.iscte.pt

This page last updated 27 May 2015

Webmaster pierre.guibentif@iscte.pt

Top Page | Home | Site Map

Site hosted by