Suchergebnisse

Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday life of scholarship has led her to study the everyday life of the law. In this article, she describes her scholarly life through seven chapters of relatively distinct challenges and themes. Across the arc of her life, she identifies the recurrent influence of both serendipity and theoretical inference acting within the immediate constraints of family and personal capacity. Reading across descriptions of her work on regulatory enforcement, dispute negotiation and mediation, and popular legal culture and consciousness, she points to the necessity of reconciling on-the-ground vicissitudes of doing legal work with the theories and narratives social scientists construct to make sense of institutions and history. She muses on theoretical attempts to align the particular and the general, the micro and macro forces working in legal cultures, and concludes by celebrating the ubiquity of social ordering whose own momentum both seduces and frustrates social scientists.

Les principes d'une démarche de recherche relevant de la tradition « Law and Society » sont de recourir à des méthodes scientifiques rigoureuses appliquées à une démarche empirique susceptible d'être soumise à évaluation par des pairs et à une critique, ceci en vue de comprendre comment le droit agit comme une institution : soit un ensemble de processus réguliers et identifiables, inspirés par des aspirations culturelles et susceptibles d'inscrire la contrainte par la règle dans des schèmes de décision. En référence à un tel cadre, cet article constitue une réponse aux questions et aux critiques de collègues français ayant entrepris une analyse approfondie des travaux de Susan Silbey (celle-ci comme co-auteure pour certains d'entre eux). Cet article débute par une réflexion sur le droit et les pratiques juridiques et propose une généalogie des études relevant du « legal consciousness ». Après un bref retour biographique consacré aux conditions de développement des travaux de Susan Silbey, l'article revient sur les interrelations micro-macro dans les études du « legal conciousness », évoquant les façons de construire une théorie à partir d'une approche empirique des rôles et des expériences du droit dans la vie quotidienne, du point de vue des citoyens plutôt que de celui des professionnels du droit. L'article est complété par un court volet consacré à une comparaison des « socio-legal studies » avec les « science and technology studies ».

La conscience du droit, en tant que concept théorique et sujet de recherche empirique, a été développée pour traiter des questions d'hégémonie juridique, en particulier la manière dont le droit maintient son pouvoir institutionnel malgré un fossé persistant entre le droit des livres et le droit en actes. Pourquoi les gens acceptent-ils un système juridique qui, malgré ses promesses d'égalité de traitement, reproduit systématiquement les inégalités ? Des études récentes ont à la fois élargi et réduit la portée du concept, tout en sacrifiant une grande partie de son potentiel critique et de son utilité théorique. Plutôt que d'expliquer comment les différentes expériences du droit sont synthétisées dans un ensemble de schémas et d'habitudes en circulation, la littérature observe ce que certains individus pensent et font. Parce que les relations entre la conscience et la dynamique des phénomènes idéologiques et hégémoniques restent souvent inexpliquées, la conscience du droit en tant que concept analytique est instrumentalisée dans le cadre de projets de politiques : produire des lois spécifiques plus efficaces pour des groupes ou intérêts particuliers.

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, following an escalating series of global financial and economic crises, we hear renewed calls for government regulation as a necessary, if not entirely sufficient, safeguard against the excesses of exuberant capitalism. At the same time as some policy advocates urge increased regulation, opponents claim that it is not capitalism nor the market that is the cause of these crises; instead, they argue, government regulation not only dampens market efficiencies and retards economic growth but encourages the predatory and fraudulent practices responsible for the recent Great Recession.

Talk of safety culture has emerged as a common trope in contemporary scholarship and popular media as an explanation for accidents and as a recipe for improvement in complex sociotechnical systems. Three conceptions of culture appear in talk about safety: culture as causal attitude, culture as engineered organization, and culture as emergent and indeterminate. If we understand culture as sociologists and anthropologists theorize as an indissoluble dialectic of system and practice, as both the product and context of social action, the first two perspectives deploying standard causal logics fail to provide persuasive accounts. Displaying affinities with individualist and reductionist epistemologies, safety culture is frequently operationalized in terms of the attitudes and behaviors of individual actors, often the lowest-level actors, with the least authority, in the organizational hierarchy. Sociological critiques claim that culture is emergent and indeterminate and cannot be instrumentalized to prevent technological accidents. Research should explore the features of complex systems that have been elided in the talk of safety culture: normative heterogeneity and conflict, inequalities in power and authority, and competing sets of legitimate interests within organizations.

The final contribution to a symposium on, "The Supreme Court Forecasting Project," explores how the project might advance or undermine the law's status as a space for shared public discourse & moral engagement. The law allows for the pursuit of disagreement in an otherwise technological & consumerist society. Recognition of the centrality of law to the cultures of modern societies by social scientists & legal realists is explored. Although the forecasting project initially appears to fulfill the dream of a social science of law, it is contended that statistical analyses of court decisions may undervalue the Court's collective moral accomplishment & suggest that structural features explain more of what happens in litigation than substantive or doctrinal particularities. Specific concerns are addressed in relation to law & the social sciences; law & consumer culture; & trust in systems. Since the law provides space for collective moral discourse, it is contended that social science needs to support, rather than hinder, popular participation & critical engagement with the law. 126 References. J. Lindroth

Draws on the views & methods of the fictional French police inspector Jules Maigret, created by Georges Simenon, to understand the popular consciousness of law. A constitutive approach is used to examine the contradictions of Simenon's books: his sociological approach, which emphasizes the opposition between law & justice; his empirical method; & his doubt of the possibility of absolute truth. It is argued that Maigret's justice emerges from the context of social structures, rather than being created through formal procedures. It is concluded that the character is an agent of sociologically informed justice, rather than simply the premier agent of the French Police Judicature. 29 References. D. Schwartz