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"This book offers a new perspective on the links between intellectual property and access to medication. Using local case studies and insights from actor-network theory, it explores the ways in which TRIPs is translated in the daily practices of those who purchase, distribute and use medicines in sub-Saharan Africa"--

This article discusses the complexity inherent in the relationship between written law and social action. It uses actor-network theory (`ANT') to amplify this complexity and considers its value both in understanding socio-legal objects and, more broadly, to socio-legal studies itself. The article uses a case study of the role of the Trade Related Intellectual Property agreement (`TRIPS') regarding pharmaceutical patents in a `least developed country', Djibouti. The study uses this pharmaceutical example to argue the insights offered by ANT, conceptualizing socio-legal objects, beyond comparable approaches such as implementation studies. It also offers a different, more compelling set of understandings than that which appears in the more standard texts on TRIPS.

This article explores how the question of biopiracy, and the rights of indigenous people in the context of patents over natural resources related to traditional knowledge became articulated within the European Union's law and policy process. It presents how this issue was first introduced into the EU during the negotiation on the Directive 98/44/EC, and which mechanisms transformed this ethical issue into a policy concern. Analyzing the history of this issue within that of Directive 98/44/EC offers significant opportunities for testing the appropriateness of multilevel governance and policy‐network theories to empirical sociolegal research in the EU context.

Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. The vast field of socio-legal studies provides multiple lenses through which law can be considered. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area. The book provides a rich resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and methods available when law is studied in its broadest social context, as well as setting those within the history of the socio-legal movement. The chapters consider multiple disciplinary lenses – including feminism, anthropology and sociology – as well as a variety of methodologies, including: narrative, visual and spatial, psychological, economic and epidemiological approaches. Moreover, these are applied in a range of substantive contexts such as online hate speech, environmental law, biotechnology, research in post-conflict situations, race and LGBT+ lawyers. The handbook brings together younger contributors and some of the best-known names in the socio-legal field. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present and future of sociolegal studies that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests in a range of subjects, including law, sociology and politics.

This chapter reflects on what materiality-inflected methodologies1 can bring to
an anthropology of law, and to legal studies more generally. Its starting point is an
increasing attention across the social sciences and humanities for objects, and thinking
beyond the human. These have often, but not only, emerged from science and
technology studies (STS), to which we pay particular attention. However, approaches
to materiality have themselves become diversified, and their implications for law can
similarly be read in multiple ways. At the same time, legal anthropology has helped to
re-characterise the complexity of law as a field of social activity by paying attention
to its meanings, for actors within as well as outside its own institutions; to its modes of
action in practice, again within its explicitly designated spaces as well as its everyday;
to its unexpected forms, patterns and directions; to its multiplicity and uncertainty.
Approaches within a broadly defined 'legal anthropology' agenda have provided tools
to move away from grand and removed theorisation of the law, or an exclusive attention
to its own claims, and towards a subtler understanding of law as a relatively fluid,
changing and uncertain set of practices. While doing so, legal anthropology has also
reminded us of the significance of empirical research to identify and theorise the
complex existences of law, a contribution which echoes some of the implications of
materiality-oriented theories.

"The relationships between law, science, and society are central to a diverse range of practical, ethical and theoretical issues. With an increasing emphasis on the fluidity and uncertainty of each of these areas, the analysis of their intersection(s) has become complex. This book examines the interface between studies of these topics from the socio-legal studies and science and technology studies (STS) perspectives. The scholars gathered here interrogate the joint roles of law and science in the construction and stabilization of socio-technical networks, objects, and standards, as well as their place in the production of contemporary social realities and subjectivities. Accordingly, scholars have borrowed from a range of disciplines and case studies to analyse not only how such intersections materialize, but also how and from where they should be approached. Knowledge, Technology and Law illustrates how these complex and multifaceted links between scientific knowledge, material artefacts, practices and identities can be charted. This volume presents original dialogues on this emerging field and will therefore be of great interest to those researching the intersections of law, science, and society"--

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.

Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. The vast field of socio-legal studies provides multiple lenses through which law can be considered. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area. The book provides a rich resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and methods available when law is studied in its broadest social context, as well as setting those within the history of the socio-legal movement. The chapters consider multiple disciplinary lenses – including feminism, anthropology and sociology – as well as a variety of methodologies, including: narrative, visual and spatial, psychological, economic and epidemiological approaches. Moreover, these are applied in a range of substantive contexts such as online hate speech, environmental law, biotechnology, research in post-conflict situations, race and LGBT+ lawyers. The handbook brings together younger contributors and some of the best-known names in the socio-legal field. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present and future of sociolegal studies that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests in a range of subjects, including law, sociology and politics.

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able to build a stable network of medical and commercial family planning services. We use 30 interviews conducted with former activists to explore this history. In doing so, we also examine the limits of 'illegality' in describing acts of everyday resistance to law, arguing that the boundaries between legal and illegal, in the discourses and practices of those who sought to challenge the state, were shifting and uncertain. In turn, we revisit 'illegality', characterizing it as an assemblage of varying selectively-performed political practices, shaped by complex choreographies of negotiation between state and non-state actors.

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalised the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able to build a stable network of medical and commercial family planning services. We use 30 interviews conducted with former activists to explore this history. In doing so, we also examine the limits of 'illegality' in describing acts of everyday resistance to law. We argue that the boundaries between legal and illegal, in the discourses and practices of those who sought actors to challenge the state, were shifting and uncertain. In turn, we revisit 'illegality', characterizing it as an assemblage of varying selectively-performed political practices, shaped by complex choreographies of negotiation between state and non-state actors.