Legal Studies after the Cultural Turn: A Case Study of Judicial Research

Abstract

Legal scholarship is something of a disciplinary misfit. It has long been dominated by and rigorously confined to an examination of the printed word found in canonical texts, the reported decisions of senior judges and written laws, statutes, generated by designated state institutions. This is an approach that goes by the name ‘the black letter tradition’. Its method is exclusively literary and, akin to biblical hermeneutics, dedicated to the discovery of the truth in those texts. If these textual preoccupations might tend to align legal studies with other literary disciplines, bringing it under the label ‘arts and humanities’, legal scholars have resisted this. Law’s preoccupation with social institutions, the formation and reformation of social relations through legal rules and judgments and the resolution of social conflict, might also tend to align law with the ‘social sciences’. A co-mingling of law and the social sciences has gained some momentum since the 1960s, as evidenced by the rise of the law and society movement and socio-legal scholarship (Sarat, 2004). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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