Presidents Speak! Origins, Evolution, and Future of the Law and Society Association
The world has changed significantly since the Law and Society Association first opened its doors in 1974. In the six decades since, the law and society movement has expanded its reach internationally, fostering an enduring global conversation about the critical junctures between law on the books and on the ground; in the academy and in the profession; on the bench and in our personal lives.
To celebrate LSA’s 60-year legacy, Professors Seth Davis (University of California, Berkeley) and Bethany Berger (University of Connecticut), along with current President Michele Goodwin (Georgetown University), assembled a panel of seven past LSA presidents at the 2024 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. Susan Silbey (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Valerie Hans (Cornell University), Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University), Laura Beth Nielsen (Northwestern University), David Engel (University at Buffalo), Michael McCann (University of Washington), and Malcolm Feeley (University of California, Berkeley) reflected on the organization’s accomplishments and goals for the future.
How has LSA shaped the study of law in and out of law schools and academia? What are the challenges and challengers to the law and society movement? How is the LSA uniquely situated to address our uncertain future?
Watch the full panel discussion to hear insights from the keepers of LSA’s past and the bearers of its future.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Seth Davis
All right, good morning everyone. I want to thank you for joining us for the “President’s Speak: Origins, Evolution and the Future of the Law and Society Association” roundtable discussion. My name is Seth Davis. I’m a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Along with my co-chair, Bethany Berger, I helped organize the events this week.
I have been so excited for this conversation, and I am so appreciative that so many presidents, current and past, have joined us for this discussion. We have such an esteemed group that if I spent time telling you about all their awards and honors and accomplishments, it would take the entire one hour and 45 minutes that we have. So what I’m going to do is just briefly introduce by name and institutional affiliation each of our roundtable participants and then ask the first question to get us going.
So, I’ll start with our current president, Michele Goodwin of the Georgetown Law Center. In addition, we are joined by Kim Lane Sheppele of Princeton University, Laura Beth Nielsen of Northwestern University and the ABF, David Engel of Suny Buffalo, Michael McCann of the University of Washington, Susan Silbey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my colleague Malcolm Feely, University of California at Berkeley, and Valerie Hans at Cornell University. So thank you all for being with us.
Michele Goodwin
Yes, and thank you for this week, both of you. Thank you so much, Bethany. Thank you Seth.
Seth Davis
I know certainly I and I think our audience as well would be really interested in just starting by hearing about your personal experiences with LSA. How did you first get involved in LSA? What drew you to the association and the movement, and how did LSA shape how you think about law?
For this I thought, Susan, perhaps we could just go in order to my left, if you’re willing to start off the conversation. Thank you.
Susan Silbey
Prerogatives of age, right? Okay. I got involved in Law and Society by going to one of the first or second annual meetings in 1980 at Madison, Wisconsin. I had just submitted with Sally Merry, who also would be here if she were here, a proposal to the National Science Foundation to study and compare cases in court and cases in mediation. I think it was called “Legitimacy and Coercion in…” something or other. Most of my friends I met there in 1980 in Madison and I just kept going, and that made my career. I would not have succeeded as a scholar were it not for Law and Society, because at that time, the American Sociological Association, as Kim is oft to say, had only one panel on the sociology of law. And then, it wasn’t the sociology of law, we were part of “Law, Crime and Deviance.” And they didn’t always give us a slot. So there wasn’t a space in sociology. So I made my home here.
Seth Davis
Thank you. Thank you Susan.
Valerie Hans
I actually went to my first meeting of the Law and Society Association in 1978 when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto in psychology. I was getting a Ph.D. in psychology with a minor in law. And at the time, Neil Vidmar, who was also a Canadian researcher who did work in psychology oriented toward law invited me to come to, I think, what was labeled the first annual meeting in Minneapolis. And I went there and was blown away. It was a small, kind of intimate gathering, a real contrast to the huge group that we have today. But I was so excited and learned so much from a multidisciplinary perspective to some of the questions of law that I had really found in my own work, most compelling.
I think what happened to me because of my exposure to Law and Society was it kept me from being an exclusively experimental psychologist. It really pushed me in a more multi-methodological direction, and then made me, I guess, more attractive when I went on the job market and got a position in an interdisciplinary criminal justice program, and then subsequently, a law school, Cornell Law School, that is known for its work in empirical scholarship on law. So it really shaped me tremendously, and I’ve been so grateful for it as my intellectual home.
Michele Goodwin
Well, so many paths lead back to Wisconsin when we think about Law and Society. This is my 25th meeting, the 25th anniversary of my coming to Law and Society. But that meeting was during a period of time in which I was working on an SJD. And what I think about in terms of the value of Law and Society is that in that period of time, the importance of being able to ground research that looked at communities of color was really so important, both to dispel what were the norms and stereotypes in American law, policy and culture. Certain terms that the audience will remember, terms like welfare queen, or if you think about certain stereotypes of black people being “criminal” or being “lazy,” all of these kinds of things that stand unless you break them apart. Its easier to break them apart through multi-methodological research, whether it’s quantitative or it’s qualitative. And at the time there was research that I was engaged in where there were real gaps. That research at the time was involving questions of organ transplantation policy. And there were real gaps. There were people who were making presumptions about this is how black people think about these issues. Having never contacted any black people, having never interviewed any, having never done any quantitative, qualitative, engagement at all. And so this work and this society became important for that work and many other questions that have flowed from my research involving engagement between law, society and the human body.
Kim Lane Scheppele
So I also go back to that 1980 meeting in Minneapolis. And one of the things I remember was that it was 1980, and there were 80 people in attendance. There were four simultaneous panels, 20 people per panel, and there was nobody in the hallway between panels because there weren’t enough people to hang out in the hallways and still fill the panels. But I want to say two things about that meeting, especially to the people who are new in the association.
So at that meeting, I met Susan. Actually, Susan and I had met the year before, but Susan Silbey, became a role model because she had done a Ph.D. in political science, and then got a job in sociology. And that was the first person I had met who had done that particular trick. And then I was writing a dissertation–I was a graduate student at the time–and the person who had inspired my dissertation was Rick Lempert. And there was an article called “Norm-Making: A Social Exchange,” which was in the Law & Society Review, it was the inspiration for the dissertation. And I saw this nametag go by that said, “Richard Lempert.” These were the days before the internet, so I had I had printed out copies of all of my graduate student papers that look vaguely law and society-ish, and I literally went up to Rick and kind of tripped him in the hallway and said, “Would you read my work?” And I just handed it to him. And then actually, four years later, when I was finally on the market, (it took me forever to write my dissertation), he called me up and said, “You know, there’s this job in political science at Michigan. They’ve been looking for seven years. They haven’t found what they were looking for. But I know the department, and I know you, and you should apply for this job. And that made me a political scientist. And following Susan, I knew this was possible. And all those things came out of the 1980 meeting. So the lesson: is look for role models of people who have been intellectual chameleons, because all of us do that.
It should be called “the Chameleon Society,” because we’re all in multiple disciplines. And the other thing is, you never know when the connections you make here will completely change your life. So that’s my introduction.
Laura Beth Nielsen
Thank you very much for having us and organizing this. This is my 30th anniversary of Law and Society. I first came in nineteen hundred and ninety four, yeah, last century, and I was a jurisprudence and social policy Ph.D. at Berkeley (Go Bears!) and at the time it really helped me coalesce what the canon of law in society is. I mean, we can debate if there is actually one or not, but that workshop was like, “here’s how you’re going to teach sociology of law here, you know, and here are a bunch of syllabi.” And so it really helped me organize the field in my head. And then the more I came, the very next year, I signed up to present and, you know, one of the first two presidents of the association, Richard Schwartz, was my commentator. And he was just delightful and said, “This is great.” And it just felt like this is the place I tell my grad students, “Walk through the book room, flip through the program, and if you want to go to 17 things at the same time, that’s your place. And so that’s how I feel every session. There are 17 things I want to go to, and you learn from every single one.
David Engel
Well, I remember very clearly the moment I became a law and society person. I had just graduated from law school, having previously been in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and I was having a lot of trouble reconciling what I had learned about law, the way we studied and thought about law, with what I thought I had learned by living in, upcountry Thailand.
So I got a grant to go back to Thailand and do research on courts and culture and history in Thailand. And I was visiting my cousin Jim Magavern in Buffalo, New York, and Jim said, “This sounds interesting. I have a young colleague here on the faculty you need to meet.” And he made a phone call and 20 minutes later, Marc Galanter came in wearing army fatigues for reasons I’m not sure, and he told me, “This is a law and society study, and here are the people you should be in touch with.” And he had a copious Rolodex in his mind, and he started rattling off names, Rick Abel, Dan Lev, June Starr, Sally Falk Moore, all of the people, Stewart Macaulay. And he said, “Write to them.” And I wrote to all of them. They all answered, and when I was in Thailand and I got stumped, I would write again, particularly Rick Abel. If you know him or if you’ve ever corresponded with him, a one-page question on my part would produce a five-page answer from Rick. So these all became people that I followed, people that guided me and mentored me.
And then I, too, went to that legendary meeting in Minneapolis. I don’t think I met either of you, but I did meet Malcolm. You probably don’t remember. And people talk about that meeting with great nostalgia. For those of us that attended, that’s the Law and Society of memory and of our hearts. So that was how I got involved. (That was 1978, right?)
Oh, and I should add one more thing. I went there because I was then at the Bar Foundation and I fell under the wing of Felice Levine. Felice said, “You must go,” and her advice is always 100% useful and accurate.
Michael McCann
It’s harder for me to pinpoint when I first became a Law and Society person. I studied in a political science Ph.D. program in the late 1970s, and I was primarily a political theorist interested in race and class in American history, and particularly interested in labor politics. I had a really hard time finding my way and feeling at home in political science as a discipline and in the department at Berkeley.
Except I stumbled into the class taught by Bob Kagan. It was called “Law and Society,” and it was the first class that was empirical in orientation and focused on institutions. So then I said, “Oh, I can do this. This is interesting. This is how I can fit my interests into some niche that political science recognizes.” And Bob became a very important mentor to me. I ended up writing a dissertation, a sociolegal type of dissertation on public interest liberalism. And I was very fortunate. And I had a number of colleagues, graduate student colleagues, who also became interested at the same time. So we were the small Law and Society group, although none of them continued in Law and Society for some reason.
But anyhow, when it was time to go to the job market, there were no jobs at all in what I did in the country in 1981, except one showed up in spring at the University of Washington and I said, “Oh, Stuart Scheingold is there, I’d like to be there.” And I was so fortunate to get a job. And Stu became my senior colleague and one of my closest friends throughout my entire career. He kind of was the magnet and partner that introduced me to Law and Society. He showed me the ropes, introduced me to a lot of people. And then when I went to early meetings in the early 1980s, a number of people reached out to me, including Susan Silbey, who really warmly welcomed me and I just quickly met people, and since then it became my intellectual home, and Law and Society has been the centerpiece. It’s been the intellectual institutional home for my entire career.
I just want to say I’m really honored to be with this distinguished group of scholars and Law and Society leaders. It’s a great honor for me to be here.
Malcolm Feeley
Yes, thank you very much for organizing this. I’m in awe that I’m in line with all these other people here. So it’s a humbling experience. But they’re all kids. They’re all kids. I’m a red diaper baby. I’ll explain that in a minute. I became involved in Law and Society on my first day of graduate school in September 5th, 1964, when I went into a class taught by a new guy that I had never known. I didn’t go to Minnesota because he was there, because he wasn’t there. He came the first year I did. That was Sam Krislov. Sam had just come from the first summer Law and Society meeting down, I think it was in Madison. And that’s all he could talk about. And so that got me involved vicariously through him. As a result, I ended up taking courses with other people at Minnesota in graduate school that were involved with the Foundation of Law and Society: the late Arnold Rose, who had worked with Gunnar Myrdal; Jeff Murphy, who was a philosopher and had published some in Law and Society and E. Adamson Hoebel, the great anthropologist of law. So I benefited from that exposure, and they were some of the foundational people in the society.
The next step in that was E. A. Hoebel directed me down to Northwestern for a summer to be a student editor on volume two, number one of the Law and Society Review. And there I got to know still other people like Vic Rosenblum and some of the other founders, and from there it just multiplied. I ended up being a Russell Sage Fellow at Yale Law School a few years later and then went back to some of the founding centers—Northwestern was one of the founding centers supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Law and Society Centers. I later taught at Wisconsin and then Yale Law School, which supported law and society scholars through its fellowship, and then I ended up at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley.
So my entire career has benefited from association with members. I remember the first meeting, which was Red Schwartz’s inaugural deanship dinner, as it were, or celebration at the State University at Buffalo where I still remember to this day the great debate between Lon Fuller and Philip Selznick.
I do also remember the Minneapolis meeting because I had gone there and I went back. But what I remember most was a dreadful talk–it wasn’t a talk, he read the thing–by Frank Michelman. The plenary session droned on for over an hour, and when I looked around three quarters of the people had left. The people that were still there, they didn’t have cell phones, but they were looking at everything. I realized there was not one person in the audience paying attention to him. And so my advice ever since that is, don’t have such people as distinguished as he was. I later read his article in the Harvard Law Review, but don’t have such people give plenary sessions.
Bethany Berger
As Seth said, I’m so honored to be here with these people on this stage and so grateful to you all for coming for this. The next question is about how Law and Society has shaped both academia and has shaped the study of law and society.
There are many firsts that we’ve heard about in Law and Society. Of course Denver, I believe, was the place of the first in 1960, a Summer Institute in the Study of Law and Society. And you all have actually shaped the study of law and society in so many ways.
But I have two questions, tied together. So how has the Law and Society Association shaped the study for academics and shaped academia? And how has it shaped the study of law and society in law schools, and the study of law outside of law schools?
We can start with Malcolm, but anybody can join in. Not everybody has to say something, but I think you all can share so much with us about that.
Malcolm Feeley
Yeah. Thanks very much. Volume one, number one of the Law and Society Review identifies two pulls that have created tensions in the Law and Society Association ever since. There’s one piece by Carl Auerbach, the great law professor, that transformed the study that brought legal education out of the Common Law Era into the Modern Administrative State Era. He and Will Hurst and others were just geniuses in doing that. And he wrote a piece and said, “Welcome to the Law and Society Association.” (He was very active at the outset) because lawyers need the help of social scientists. The modern administrative state particularly needs facts gathered systematically to tell us what to do and tell us how well we are doing. So this is a social scientist as a handmaiden of the lawyer. And some of us resented that, even though we appreciate that it’s an honorable enterprise.
The other piece in that volume was by Jerry Skolnick that said, “the sociology of law, or the academic study of law is not insight, not like a school of theology, but like a school of comparative religion standing outside looking at the institution of law. It wants to understand the theory of expanding legality. Legality is what constrains power, so we want to understand the causes and conditions that give rise to expanded legality.” And that strikes me as the tension: one is practical, can be theoretically practical, but still practical. The second is a theory of law and society or the theory of law in society, something like that. And that’s the tension that goes on, and most of my friends have chosen one or the other. But I point out that economics is both the most theoretical of the social sciences and the most practical. So I don’t see any great tension between the two and one needs the other, in fact. So that’s my view.
The other thing is, there are hundreds of reviews and journals that deal with law. If you go back 50, 70 years ago, there were two or three. The Law and Society Review precipitated—the Law and Economics Association started in Law and Society. Law and Psychology started in many respects in Law and Society; their journals flowed from that. So it has had a tremendous impact.
Another impact on law and law schools– and particularly for the last 40 years I’ve been witnessing at the law schools. When I first joined law school, a job talk was telling about the latest brief you had worked on, and often with the request that you not tell the partners at the firm that you are interviewing for a job. Once people with Ph.Ds. joined law faculties, and they gave job talks from their dissertations, it transformed the recruitment of law professors. I would assume in major law schools now that 30% to 60% of the people interviewed have JDS and Ph.Ds. It just transformed radically the nature of law school, and law schools have transformed the nature of legal publications. There are now lots of peer reviews, or at least faculty-reviewed, law journals that there weren’t 50 years ago.
Susan Silbey
So, I will comment on how or what law and society has given to the study of law and society, not to the law school. I think that it began—and Malcolm’s work was a very important example–it began with an emphasis on what happened in legal institutions that was not legally or officially prescripted. And the study of the additional non-legal practices or decision-making, how it shaped Malcolm’s book, The Processes, the Punishment was one of the first of those. So that was the beginning. But they looked in law offices, courts, agencies for this non-legal behavior. But then, I think Lawrence Friedman liked to call that an “addition of culture.” But he meant within formal legal institutions. So the next transformation of the study of law and society was to look at practices outside of legal institutions, to see where the law infiltrated homes, restaurants, life, on the streets, as Laura Beth did. And what I and lots of our friends called “law in everyday life.” Making up terms to go with that with storied and contested histories.
So I think the third change that I would identify is bringing the law texts back into law and society, when they had been sort of kicked out in the beginning, and it was to bring in non-legal texts and to read them that was the humanities movement. But then it’s looking at legal texts and what I notice in the meetings lately is a lot more law professors who do not do it, looking at behavior, they’re looking at the analysis of the text very much like law professors normally do. But I would say we have done one other thing across these changes. We have created a language. We have a set of concepts that get used over and over again, whether it’s about litigation, naming, claiming, blaming, building the pyramid of disputing, whether it’s moving. I remember in the 80s, the discussion of dispute resolution immediately getting rid of the word “resolution” into “handling” and “managing” so it didn’t have the valence that there was a necessary outcome, or the term “legal consciousness.” But we’ve created some durable models that have traveled and I think that is what is in use and making new knowledge.
Bethany Berger
So I’m unfortunately shaking things up by going the starting the opposite way; I know Valerie has a contribution here, but I want to go to Michael because he has to leave at 10:45. So.
Michael McCann
Thank you. Sorry that I do have to leave, but I have a pre-arranged flight. I’m going to talk a little bit more locally. I want to talk about the impact in the field of political science and in my own department at the University of Washington. It’s interesting that we developed a critical mass of sociolegal scholars, not only in political science, but in sociology and anthropology and the humanities and so forth. And it clearly changed the kind of discourse and the imaginations of my colleagues in political science who weren’t law and society scholars. It quickly became apparent to me after we developed momentum, with my colleagues, that when somebody came for a job talk, they’re going to have to answer a question about law stuff. And I wasn’t the one usually asking the question. So it became part of the internal discourse that really changed, added to political science, but I think also changed, transformed, the imagination. And the colleagues became familiar with some of the ideas, like what Susan was talking about, about legality, about “law is everywhere,” that everyone participates in it and it’s constituted by, to some degree, legal concepts and legal understanding and legal knowledge, and that law shapes institutional practices, law shapes aspirations, and it just becomes an essential part of how we understand social/political interaction. And that’s the sort of the microcosm, but I saw that happen with a lot of colleagues in political science elsewhere. And at the same time also, I think endorsed, multidisciplinarity in a way that was not all that much respected among political science colleagues before that, the value of different kinds of methodologies, different epistemologies, and a respect for qualitative work, in particular. So it had a force, had ripples even beyond those who I didn’t identify as law and society scholars.
Valerie Hans
Thanks. My observations about teaching in a law school are very much like yours, Malcolm, where if you think about traditional law school instruction, as you know, “law on the books” and “legal doctrine,” the law and society perspective, “law in action” has clearly taken over even in the first year curriculum, where the case books often offer notes, reporting work by many people on this panel. So people get exposure even at that level and certainly have more advanced courses that they can take that focus on social sciences as applied to law. But I want to talk about a way in which I think the Law and Society Association has, by one of its initiatives, really fundamentally changed certainly my own work and the work of people in my specific area, which is studying how lay people make legal decisions, whether they’re juries, lay judges, lay assessors, or are in courts outside the formal legal system, and that was the initiation at I think the 2000 Budapest meeting of CRNs, collaborative research networks. I think that had–and I’d love to hear if others had this experience too–it certainly in my own field had a phenomenal impact.
The idea of a collaborative research network is to organize people around particular subject areas or research areas, but with a specific emphasis on people from multiple countries. And this really pushed me, and I think many of my fellow researchers, to consider the wide range of ways that people wind up contributing to legal decision making around the world. I think that was so enriching, and I’m so grateful for the CRNs and the other initiatives that the Law and Society Association has promulgated over the years to really push to make us more transnational, international, and welcoming to different groups around the world.
Michele Goodwin
So I would say that what we do is not in a vacuum. And in so many ways, I think the burden of academia is one where it can be an ivory tower, divorced from reality, a navel-gazing of people citing their friends and their colleagues without much attention to how the world really operates. And I think that the benefit of Law and Society has been in thinking about how institutions, how people in those institutions, how we in society, are affected: by laws, by cultures, affected by laws that are written on the book, but that don’t yield the promise of what’s written on the books, and also practices that seem just like laws.
And if you add on to that matters of inclusion–who’s out, who’s in, sort of layer in poverty–what do these questions mean for communities that are shut out from political processes because they happen to be poor? Or because they happen to be gendered or sexed in a particular kind of way? Or because of their skin color and race or religion? And then you get something far more dynamic to understand in terms of how law is actually operating, right?
One example of law that is not on the books, but clearly of some form of legal order, is the history of lynching in the United States. Where you could grab someone out of their home, out of a space of incarceration, and lynch them in the town square in front of police officers, right at the Capitol steps. And then take group photos smiling, have picnics, char and burn the bodies, send the photos all around the country at a time in which the Comstock Law was in effect, which banned the distribution through mail of things that are obscene and lewd. It says a whole lot when you think that charred black bodies are not lewd, not obscene, no real problem. And then you ask yourself, “Well, is that law?” Right? “Is it law when you can have that kind of practice go on, and nobody thinks anything of it?” Or of course, this work that’s been talked about, the sort of “law on the books, law on paper” that yet doesn’t yield what it’s supposed to. This idea about equality in society, a right to vote.
In the very same year that Law and Society came into being, we hear from a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer from Mississippi, talking about a group of black women being dragged off of a bus after they had attempted to register to vote in Mississippi, a place that made black people guess how many bubbles on a bar of soap, jellybeans in a jar, recite the state’s constitution, in order to be able to vote. Things not actually on the books, but certainly that’s the practice. And then describing how, when she and other black women are taken to a jail and she hears the cries of one being beaten, and then she’s taken into a cell and they’re taken into a jail with men, and she’s being beaten over the head. And then she tells this story the year that Law and Society is founded. And she says all of this because we refuse to be second class citizens. All of this because we want to be able to vote. And Law and Society has a lot to say and do within the space of all of what that looks like. Laws on the books, laws not on the books. How do we interpret this? And how, then, do we give it back in a way that is beyond what academia typically holds out for?
And that is to say, I think that one of the real powers of Law and Society has been this amazing work that folks have done here on this stage, to translate something back to policymakers, and to those who are in other institutions. Shining a light on, “You say this is what law is, but is it really? You say that this is fair and equal and unbiased, but let’s show you this research that shows it is absolutely biased. You say that incarceration looks this way because more black and brown people just commit more crime. And then you take the work done by our colleagues that show that’s not true. It just happens that you police more over there. It just happens that you police on the outside of the gates of Yale, rather than on the inside of the gates of Yale.” And then that would tell us a very different story. And so I think that part of that is something very important for Law and Society.
David Engel
Amazing comments. I wanted to add a little bit on a topic Valerie raised, the question of “How has Law and Society affected the way law is taught in law schools? My understanding is that now, at least 50% of the membership of Law and Society is from outside the U.S. Is that figure correct? It’s very strong, which is a great change from even the time when I was president in 1997, when we were excited to see that 20% of the membership came from outside the United States.
So how has Law and Society affected the way law is taught outside the United States? This has been a subject of interest to me recently in the context of Asia, so I can say a word or two about that: not much. It has not affected the way law is taught in Asian law schools very much. They’re still heavily doctrinal, most of them part of the Civil Law Tradition.
But what’s fascinating to me about the Asian situation is that Law and Society is booming in Asia. There’s a yearning for the things that Law and Society can show, as Michele was suggesting, especially among younger scholars, younger Asian scholars. So there are organizations, conferences, journals of law and society that are emerging in Asia in recent years, and young scholars in particular are eager to learn about the methods, the theories, the findings of law and society scholars, in part for the very reason, Michele, that you were describing. They want to be able to say, you know, “The laws in our country, almost all transplanted laws, mostly from European models, are not working in the way that you think that they’re working.” And law and society research can tell us something about what’s actually happening and can help us to hear the voices of people who legal scholars and legal authorities and courts and legislators are not accustomed to hearing, and in fact don’t care that much about or presume to be able to speak for them without any evidence, without any empirical basis at all. So to me this has been quite thrilling, to see the excitement that our field has generated in other countries.
And I would add that it’s not a matter of North American academic disciplines radiating out to other countries, because another interesting discovery is that you could say the arrows point in the other direction. In Japan, for example, they were doing empirical law and society research in the early 1900s, and they formed their Law and Society Association organization almost 20 years before LSA was formed. And some of the Japanese, South Asian, Indonesian scholars, both from those countries and Europeans who traveled to those countries, those scholars were very influential in forming the discipline of law and society. And our founding parents in LSA in many cases traveled to those countries, learned from those scholars, and shaped their own understanding of how law should be studied.
So, you know, we all have our own origin myths; people from Buffalo who think that Buffalo was the place of origin for law and society, but maybe we can rethink the origins of law and society, at least some of the roots of law and society, and identify the origins as lying outside of North America.
Laura Beth Nielsen
I just want to talk a little bit about the other direction, if you will, not of law and society into law schools, but law and society into disciplinary departments. You cannot (usually) go to the American Sociological Association or the American Political Science Association and give an analysis where the end is, “And so there should be a law.” Because it’s going to not work in the way you want it to, there are these institutional-level structures that affect individuals and have profound and deep hegemonic roots that are going to buttress these structures of inequality. And one of the reasons that I think it’s really important to be teaching these principles to undergrads is they’re going to go off in the world with an understanding about law, whether they go to law school or not. And sometimes you do get those calls, “Hey, I’m a corporate lawyer now. I’m really thinking differently about what’s happening in this dispute because I’m thinking about distorting the law, or I’m thinking the McCann book or I’m thinking about The Process is the Punishment. And one of the turns, Susan, in your history that you gave very eloquently just a second ago, I think like what Laurie Edelman (may her memory be a blessing) sort of taught us was, we engaged in this cultural turn, she showed, empirically. And what that allowed us to do was begin to connect structure, policy, ideology, hegemony, to the individual experience. And it was happening in the ‘90s when, what else was happening? Critical race theory! Those two things coming together. My first LSA, as I just said, Laura Gomez was the plenary speaker at the grad student workshop who went on to be the first president of color of our association, and she talked about why you have to study race in from a law perspective, but also from a perspective of historical and cultural contingency. And I think that has been a really important part of Law and Society’s legacy is looking at structures of inequality and privilege and individuals operating in them.
Kim Lane Scheppele
So much has been said, so let me just add a few last things. We got the questions in advance, so when I was thinking about this, I was thinking along Susan’s lines of, “What are the intellectual contributions of our field?” And there are three things that I think haven’t been said yet: Counterfeits, Constitutions, and Circulation.
So counterfeits. What Michele said reminded me of one other aspect of these public lynchings that you were talking about was that black men would be dragged out of prison, and then there would be a fake trial, often presided over by a real judge. And the question is, why bother? Like, if you’re just going to do the lynching, why not just do that, right?
And so there all of these places in social life where there’s this attempt to counterfeit law as a way of trying to gain legitimacy. And you see it all over the place, lots of ethnographic studies where people set up courts that have absolutely no connection to the state or whatever, so what you see are the legal forms spreading into other areas, sometimes with the goal of lifting them up and making them more legal and sometimes with the goal of covering up the violence that’s going to happen. So counterfeits are something else that I think has been a kind of contribution that we made too. You see those things once you know they’re there.
The other is constitutions, but I don’t mean in the sense of “We the People.” I mean in the sense that, in addition to a lot of the things Susan said, I guess I wanted to pull up one other theme, which is the constitutive power of law to make institutions. So I now teach sociology of law that way. You know, we have sections on money. What is money? It’s just like a piece of paper unless there’s a legal infrastructure that gives it value. Or marriage. Why did people fight so hard for marriage equality? Because it’s a legal status that is more than just the relationship, right? It transforms the relationship. Or citizenship. Or you can go through many of the things that we all study, and what we’re studying is a legal form that gets filled in with content. But you can’t do it without the legal form. I think this was kind of a late addition to law and society, right? where it was “How does law work?” and like, whatever the doctrine is like, that’s somebody else’s job. I think now we’re kind of seeing doctrine as a structuring force that doesn’t control everything, right? But you can’t think without it. So the constitutive force of law is something.
And then the last thing which I think we’re just kind of getting hold of now, is what I think of as the circulating force of law. And this is where a lot of the international work, I think, is going. I must say that I was such a I was an Americanist. I mean, like really in Americanist. As in, I didn’t get a passport until I defended my dissertation. Those of you who know me as doing only international work should know that I wasn’t like that, and the thing that actually transformed me was when Law and Society had its first international meeting. I got stuck on the program committee, I’m thinking, “Why the hell do we have to go to Amsterdam? Like it’s so far?” But then that meeting was like, “Oh my God, like there’s a world!” and never look back. So, you know, that was a thing.
But what I mean about the circulation of legal ideas is that we’re now seeing, you know, because of transportation, because of new media and so on, that legal ideas invented in one place are moving to another place. And I study the dark side of that force. You know, what happens when Viktor Orbán, you know, figures out how to control the state in ten minutes and then it shows up in the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 report, right? Get rid of the civil service law, lop off the top 50,000 employees in the civil service, fill them with your own folks, and you don’t even have to wait for Senate confirmation. Read Project 2025. That’s exactly what Viktor Orbán did. And when I saw that, I thought, looks familiar? Talk to journalists. One of them actually did the work. Viktor Orban’s people wrote part of that document.
So what you’re seeing is like, there’s this movement of terrible ideas, right? There used to be kind of a movement of good ideas, but now I think the real action is in the circulation of really devious, awful ideas.
Which brings me back around to counterfeit. They’re using law to legitimate projects that undermine the principles of legality. And I think it’s really this law and society perspective that allows us to see all of that.
Michele Goodwin
And to tag to that, in thinking about the navel-gazing U.S. versus looking abroad, the playbook that starts in the U.S., that spreads abroad, you can think about that in the context of the liberalization of reproductive rights through Roe v. Wade. But within the same context the Helms Amendment that shuts down reproductive health rights and justice for black and brown women all across the world whose countries might use U.S. aid, so that kind of counterfeiting exactly.
Kim Lane Scheppele
Exactly, Forum on the Family, right?
Michele Goodwin
Yeah!
Kim Lane Scheppele
It’s going both ways.
Seth Davis
Malcolm, did you want to react as well?
Malcolm Feeley
To follow up and maybe synthesize a couple of the points, I’ll do this by illustrating. I think that the single most important law and society program in the United States is the Amherst Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought program. Why do I think that? Not because I think they have it right. I think they have it wrong a little bit. But what they argue, the presumption is that law is a ubiquitous form of social ordering. Everywhere and always there has been law. (Maybe there are stateless societies here and there, argue the anthropologists.) But law is like the family it’s like the economy it’s like government. It’s a ubiquitous form of social organization. And the difference between the family and the economy and other things, it’s largely invisible to us, as has been pointed out. So it’s important to think of this as an institution as a whole. Legality is not always good; we’ve heard many instances where it’s bad. But neither is the economy and neither are these other things. So it’s important to think of law as one of these core ubiquitous institutions that has been present everywhere throughout human history and as a result, it ought to be–and this is why I like the Amherst program so much–it ought to be a central feature in any arts and sciences curriculum in universities and in scholarship. We ought to think of it as the equivalent of the market or the family, which have big institutional supports and investigations.
Seth Davis
Well, Malcolm, my wife is an Amherst grad, so I’m sure she’d be really happy to hear your words today.
I was so struck as each of you spoke about the strength, the depth, and the breadth of the legacy of law and society and the LSA. And I will just say, as someone who’s been coming to Law and Society meetings for a decade or so, one of the things that really resonated for me in my own development is the point about breadth and circulation globally that Valerie, David, and Kim emphasized. I will say my own scholarship has been so shaped by the CRNs, by the global reach of the Association, and I know each of you has done so much to create that positive, not pernicious, but positive circulation and breadth. And so I want to thank you for that.
I want to now turn and try to provoke a bit by asking questions about challenges and challengers to the law and society movement. Like any intellectual movement, law and society has had internal challenges and external challenges as well, and I would be really curious, anyone who would be willing to speak a little bit, about what you think one of the most salient challenges to the law and society movement has been, how the movement has responded, any role that LSA has played, and how responding to those challenges has itself been an engine of the development of this legacy that you all have been telling us about today.
Laura Beth Nielsen
So one of the first things that happened when I was president was there was a challenge to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings, and particularly the way that they wanted to score law faculty. And I didn’t know very much about it, but Beth Mertz brought it to me. And the Association looked at the issue, and what it would have done is made scholars who really focus on law and society less valuable in the U.S. News and World Report points system. The Association rallied, the executive committee got together, we wrote the letter and it did change how they decided to count peer review publications and in fact, got rid of a whole category of things that was going to really skew the law school world. So I think those are things we have to constantly be looking out for. What are the ways in which these non-legal—right? This isn’t the AALS, which is non-legal too, but–it’s a for-profit magazine. But it’s shaping our intellectual journey.
And then the second one, I’ll just say really quickly is, the National Science Foundation in the last few years has renamed our section or division. It’s “law and science.” It’s not “law and social science.” And I do think one of the challenges for us is to continue to be on the lookout for the ways in which major funders and other organizing institutions that are counting and classifying and funding us are defining us. Or in the law and science question, perhaps defining us out of the category of being worth funding.
Seth Davis
So, Susan, I know you want to respond directly.
Susan Silbey
I happened to have a conversation last night with the current director of the Law and Science program at NSF. Oh you did too?
Laura Beth Nielsen
Well, not last night, but yes.
Susan Silbey
Well, she implied to me that yes, it’s called “law and science,” but it’s really “law and social science.” That’s what she said. I have to take her at her word, and we’d have to look at the data to see what gets funded and what does not.
On the original question about challenges, I think that the Association has responded to a challenge that was there for 36 or some years. When I was editor of the journal, I did a little data analysis of an issue that used to come up in board meetings about how many people come to a Law and Society meeting once or twice and never again. And so I made a data set of every person who ever showed up and how often. And it was a power log [gestures] that’s what a power log looks like, long tail. I looked at who the people were, and there was a cabal. The long tail was less than 200 people, same names over and over and over again, sitting on this panel and elsewhere. And lots of people came and did not feel welcome. But I think what Valerie said, creating the CRNs gave people a smaller place to attach. And I think the student workshops, routinizing those. Before those became institutionalized in the Association, we had random summer workshops, and to be frank, they were the province or toy of a little in-group who would, you know, take a favorite topic, invite all their friends and then there were competitions among the little groups. And I think the Association has become more institutionalized, routinized, their practices are more egalitarian and open in those regards and the CRNs and the workshops. And so one wants to give advice to newcomers, don’t be afraid to talk to people. A certain number are assholes, but most of them are not. And then you can come back another time.
Seth Davis
Malcolm, I had seen your hand.
Malcolm Feeley
Took two quick questions. One is Laura Nader, who’s sort of a friendly critic of Law and Society, has made the point repeatedly to me that Law and Society does not do what it should and what anthropologists should but don’t do, and that is study up. Law and society research is usually about what’s happening on the ground, and it doesn’t study big structures and big institutions. I think that’s quite right. There’s not a whole lot about corporations in America, and the constitutions are a part of that. So I think Law and Society has failed to follow Laura’s admonition and study up and look at power sources and how they emanate out. They do that indirectly by looking at the consequences of power structures. But they don’t look at the structures and how they are institutionalized in society and how they gain and maintain power.
There’s a second thing that I worry about. My brother has taught history in France for the past 50 years in Grenoble, and he knows a little bit about Law and Society. And he says, as we’ve gone abroad and so on, “You’re the McDonald’s that is taking over France. I can’t buy croissants now, but I can buy McDonald’s in Paris easily.”
So I do worry about that. And if you remember the wonderful plenary talk given by Upendra Baxi a few years ago, he was saying, “You guys don’t do two things that are really important around the world, which is central to people’s lives around the world: one is religion and the other is agriculture. You have an American-centric view, and you’re projecting it on the rest of the world. So despite what David and others have said about the two-way street, I’m afraid it’s largely a two-way street with three lanes going in one direction and one in the other. So I’m wondering.
What is so encouraging to me is what such what Miyazawa and and Lynette Chua and probably you are involved in, creating and spawning off the CRN that became the Asian Law and Society Association. That’s a that’s a CRN that took root. And I think the Association ought to try to promote more. Among other things, it would make it easier for people to get to the meetings if they were more regional or local.
Seth Davis
I know Michele wanted to respond, and then Susan.
Michele Goodwin
So I’d say that there’s—I’m going to address this as internal and external, and start with the internal and then matters of credibility and legitimacy. If you look at the stage itself, one might say, “Is this what Law and Society looks like?” It’s actually not what it looks like when you come to a Law and Society meeting. But it does say something about the arc of the academy, who gets in and who and who doesn’t. Right? Because you first have to get in most before you come to a Law and Society meeting. I mean, we welcome anybody, but the people who come are academics mostly. And so what is it saying about the arc of our academic spaces and matters of access and inclusion?
And it turns out that in spaces that are often presumed to be very liberal and progressive, there’s been implicit and explicit racism and bias. Sexism, too. Hard to break in. I know this quite well because for a number of years I served on faculty hiring, even chairing committees because of what I would see and because of what I would hear in rooms about candidates, things that were just absolutely striking, absolutely striking. You can present ten files before a faculty, and it’s only when you get to the black guy that someone says, “Well, where are the transcripts?” Literally. I’ve sat in those rooms. We didn’t ask about transcripts with anybody else, but here we are. And behind the veil it turns out there are still real challenges on hiring within our profession. We don’t talk about it. And sometimes it’s the people that we most think–I mean, I could give you way too many examples, we don’t have time on this panel, of the things that I’ve heard and the kind of work that I’ve had to do, serving on committees, chairing, to try to weed that out so that candidates could get a fair shot. So then that says something about how to grow within this space.
And then there’s a question about legitimacy. CRT was mentioned by you. I mean, we all remember about 25 years ago in The New York Times and other places where they published articles excoriating scholars that were writing on matters of race, saying, “Why are you doing this? Why are you being disruptive? You should be happy that you’re teaching at, [name blank law school]. Why are you making white people feel bad?” And don’t we hear this again now, with books being banned? So those kinds of challenges within the academy and even within Law and Society. But then creating CRNs and spaces where then that could percolate up.
I’d say also something that has been a benefit for us that’s been named, our international engagement. Engaging with us, us engaging externally as well, also raises issues because we are a very broad society. This meeting 1,900 people, in Portugal over 4,000. Everybody has an issue and a concern. How do we raise everybody’s issue and concern? You know, we prepare meetings several years in advance. You pick your chairs and whatnot. Why isn’t this issue being discussed or that? It was, you know, because we were planning this meeting in advance and other things. And that’s real! But it’s dynamic and it’s great. But I would say one other thing, which is the external part on credibility and legitimacy. And that credibility and legitimacy happens to be in the sources that we seek to engage with. And I’ll give an example. Very recently, I was in front of Congress. I give congressional testimony, and it was a hearing that was about Covid. So in our work we engage quantitatively and qualitatively, we’re in and of these spaces and other spaces where facts don’t matter anymore, right? Where it used to be what we produced, they were like, “Okay, we can see how you produced it” and whatnot, but sitting on a panel before lawmakers that are saying, you know, “Covid lasted two weeks and that’s it. It was done. The rest was a hoax. The rest was tyranny of the state.” That’s a matter of credibility and legitimacy externally.
Seth Davis
Valerie?
Valerie Hans
Yeah, I think–and this happened I think earlier, actually, maybe around the time of your presidency–there was a challenge to the field of law and society and also, I think, to the Association, by Critical Legal Studies, which many empirical researchers saw as a wholesale rejection of everything they had done in the past and everything they were going to be doing in the future. And that’s why I’d love to hear how you kind of navigated that. I think we’re beyond–I don’t know if we’re beyond it, but at least at a moment in which there’s discussion and interaction and, some, I think, good interactivity between people who are critical of empirical work and those who actually are doing the empirical work, maybe now informed. I’m reminded of a group of scholars who do empirical work on critical race, for example. So I think that was a challenge. I think it may have shaped and changed some of the people who are in the Law and Society Association, some of whom said, “Nope, this isn’t for me,” and fled to other organizations. I think economists probably most obviously, but other empirically-based social scientists.
Susan Silbey
So the question has changed a little bit. To answer Valerie, I was annoyed, which is always very productive, by my friends in Critical Legal Studies saying that science and social science were part of the oppressive superstructure. Well, I take that as an example of a consistent kind of error that happens. The same as Laura saying that we don’t study up. We do study up. Not easy to get into corporations, but some people do. And studying judges is not studying down. Studying the law profession, law firms is not studying down. It’s a matter of taking an outlier and saying it’s the whole. And it’s the same activity that happened in critical legal studies. Because science becomes a tool of those who are powerful, doesn’t mean that science is the problem. It’s the use of science. So I wrote a few papers about that.
I’ll give you an example, if I might speak personally. When we finished The Common Place of Law, Bryant Garth said to me, “Oh, Susan, you do such good work, but you study the wrong people. You should study elites, not ordinary people.” So he got me going. But then Lauren and Carol Heimer and others say, “Well Susan, this is all well and good, but you study individuals. You ought to study organizations. That’s where things happen.” And I thought the sociologists were right. And so I study scientists, and I study scientists to see: do they behave the way ordinary people do about the law, these cognitive elites with great deal of protection, a great deal of legitimacy?
They’re just like everybody else.
Kim Lane Scheppele
Just looking over the broad arc of how Law and Society has developed, I guess what I’m struck by is something that Valerie mentioned, but we’ve extruded a lot of people. I mean, I was Membership Chair when the economists left (even though my work was a critique of theirs anyway). But the economists left, and then the folks who were claiming the word “empirical,” which I must say is one of my real pet peeves, a lot of us do empirical work that isn’t numbers. But the people for whom empirical is numbers left and formed another association. We also lost a lot of the humanists as the Law, Culture and Humanities group formed.
And so I’m grateful that the group has grown. I’m grateful for what it is and the diversity of different forms of study and the increasing internationalization, I hope the increasing diversity along many dimensions that the Association has tried and often not completely achieved. But we have lost a lot of constituencies, and in some ways that makes us more coherent to the group that’s left. But here’s what I worry about: Law and Society is now overwhelmingly qualitative and critical. It’s one of the reasons why we love it. It’s one of the things that makes us a target. And so what I’m worried about now, as we’re seeing this kind of right wing assault on universities and on facticity–you know, all of the kind of things that we’ve advocated as method have not been picked up by our “empirical colleagues.” Who’s working on social construction?
It’s the right. The far right. The contingency of facticity is something that is part of our bloodstream. And we have not succeeded in convincing our academic colleagues that that’s what’s happening in their side of science. The right has picked this up and just denied facts altogether. So it seems to me, you know, that one of the things we really need to think hard about is, what does our scholarship look like when qualitative and critical becomes weaponized against us? And what do we do when the conversation we thought was just among ourselves, turns out now to be eavesdropped on by people who want to weaponize these ideas against us, and they have an entirely hostile view of the kinds of things that we value? So I think that’s our next challenge, and I hope we can think about that in future meetings.
Michele Goodwin
And I want to say this, too, given the time that we’re in. This video will be timestamped in the summer of 2024. A time in which we’ve seen the weaponization of academic freedom. Where young people on college campuses have been arrested, have been beaten–professors too–as they’ve set up encampments. Peaceful encampments, mostly on the center square of campuses.
We’ve seen administrators act incredibly aggressive toward students that have paid tuition, that have taken out loans to underwrite the housing, that have seen that housing taken away, that have seen themselves suspended–at a time in which summer was coming, in which their parents would be calling them home. But instead seeing the use of police, sometimes not just the local police, but police from surrounding areas, coming in. Such dramatic pain.
We’ve seen a lot of pain around the world. And for a society that is broad, that has an international reach, we see places where there are pain, where our membership is right along, side by side, and there is conflict, pain, war, death. We’ve seen a time in which there is a struggle to figure out, well, how to articulate in those spaces, and can you prioritize one versus the other when in fact, we also have seen historic patterns of groups that always get ignored, right?
So in this space we are sitting here after October 7th and we’re sitting here after November, December, January, February, March, April, and May as well. And then there’s pain all around. We’ve seen between Israel and Gaza and in Rafah, so much pain and destruction. We’ve seen kidnaping and then we’ve seen decimation. Right?
We’ve seen on these college campuses that have been framed as pro-Palestinian protests, where there are Jewish students right alongside, right, because this is also just antiwar. Students who are concerned about that and not seeing it framed in the media as it should. There are not that many Palestinian students in the United States for this to be framed as, “Here are the Palestinian students,” when in fact there are students of conscience who’ve come forward, and professors too.
And then there are the spaces that nobody pays attention to. Since January, in the Congo, 6 to 700,000 people displaced, and in recent years 6 to 7 million deaths. And what’s it connected to? Our cell phones, our tablets and all of that. Right? I mean, it’s that which is a challenge within law and society, but also an opportunity! Because we have CRNs and people lift those matters up. But also the challenge of all being together and how do we fit all together while still being able to have meetings where we can get along, where we can do this, do our best work, where there are also some serious limitations as well. And that’s a struggle that I think that we will always have. And maybe that struggle is also a reflection of the fact that we were born out of a struggle and are just trying to sort of keep ourselves together to create a space where we can be respectful and kind to each other.
And let me just close with this. In this convening, Bethany, you and Seth brought forward a consideration of indigeneity and what that means here. How much do Americans just forget about that altogether? A history that’s just been lost and forgotten about. And I think about that, too, within the context of Covid. “Wash our hands.” But what does it mean to wash your hands when you live on reservations that people have forgotten about and 60% of you, 40% of you have no access to water? How are you supposed to wash your hands? And these are the things that we don’t talk about that we forget about. And so I also want to thank you for surfacing that even though some people were like, “Why?” Why? Because it matters. Why? Because there are issues we still have not resolved from, at least in this nation its own origin story of pain. So it’s the friction of our challenge, and our opportunity I think is in part, you know, what law and society is.
Bethany Berger
So for our concluding question, I wanted us to think about, and Michele’s statement is an excellent intro into that, the future of Law and Society and the opportunities that it offers for this truly scary moment for both law and society.
Just to start us on a more positive tone, I remember my first meeting, I was so struck by how welcoming these people were from fields that I knew very little about, and how excited we all were about sharing with each other, our work to enrich that work. And I’ve been excited at seeing that this meeting, particularly by the very junior scholars who have expressed that same sense of amazement that they are being welcomed into a community to support them.
So any thoughts about the future and opportunities that Law and Society has in this moment?
Michele Goodwin
Well, I’ll start off in terms of thinking about the opportunity. The opportunity is in part building pipelines, and with endowments being able to support those pipelines. So one very positive thing has been the growing of our quasi-endowment. And thank you very much to those on this panel; Laura Beth, I’m looking at you too, for making that a real priority within your presidency. Which continues for me, that is, trying to cultivate and curate the resources that help us support graduate students and that can help us support scholars who may be more economically vulnerable domestically and abroad in their efforts to be able to come and join and be in fellowship with our meetings. I think as much inspiring as we can do in that lane, I think is so incredibly important. And I think that to the point that you were making, Kim, about who are we, who’s left and who’s left behind is also in challenging ourselves too, because it’s important to have a critical engagement where we look back at ourselves, “Are we actually doing this right? Or are we just the sort of echo chamber of patting each other on the back?”
And I guess that’s less opportunity, but I do think that we need to be dynamic in thinking about what comes next and making sure that this remains a space where we ask ourselves hard questions, and where we deal with challenging questions and circumstances. I think that that’s critically important. And as we think about it, you know, we have opportunities every few years, we have meetings that are global, we go someplace else in the world, and the opportunity to go to places we haven’t been before, such that we don’t just navel gaze to Europe, but that we find ways to be more engaged in spaces that have been so hungry to engage with us and where we can learn.
Susan Silbey
I agree totally with what Michele just said. And I noticed in the meetings here topics that I was surprised to see. Lots of discussion about the regulation of AI. And so I would say that on one hand, the future, if we’re good and do what you’re suggesting, is we reach out to those fields that are not here now, like agriculture or, but also to those professional disciplines that are studying law without our depth of knowledge and concepts and tools. In my position at an unusual school, it happens all the time. They come over and it’s a computer scientist or it’s something else. And they say, “I was sent to talk to you because I’m interested in this and that, you know, I want to know about regulation of, natural language programing or something like that. So I’m with you, and we need to get the law and society language, multi-methods, theories into management, into computer science, into lots of other fields.
And then I can’t help but say: but it will all be dependent on what happens in November. We might be in an entirely different business. And it would behoove us to consider how we would go forward, to relegitimate facticity.
David Engel
Yes, I very much agree with everything that’s been said so far. As I think about the future, I think one of the striking things, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time abroad, is that the difference between “here” and “there” is much less significant than it used to be. And the younger scholars that we’ve been working with are everywhere. An Asian scholar might be in Canada or the U.S. and vice versa. But the significance of their location is that it doesn’t become a barrier to collaboration, to teaching, to learning. So I think that the future is going to sort of collapse some of the difficulties we’ve had in travel and in communication, and leave only the sort of perennial difficulties of communicating that are language and culture and so on. But, the fact that contact is more easily done now means that those barriers can be addressed more systematically.
Kim Lane Scheppele
So I’m normally an optimistic person, but I’m a little pessimistic about the world’s near future. I used to work at the Russian Constitutional Court, and then I worked–actually, I worked at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. These are courts that have disappeared as independent institutions. And mostly I worked in Eastern Europe and I rode the democratic wave up. And now we’re seeing the democratic door close. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the last five or six years dealing with refugee scholars from places that we didn’t used to think of refugees as coming from. Not just war zones, although also now increasingly that. And so what I’ve seen and also talking to so many people at this meeting, is how much private pain people are going through because their lives are being immensely disrupted, and the anxiety that people are feeling about this year of elections almost everywhere in the world. I mean, it’s more elections than anywhere else. We’ve had some optimistic elections like India turned out better than we thought, some worse, like the Netherlands and, you know, anyway, so we can go on about that. But the point is that at this point, we also need to be a support structure for each other, you know, in personal ways and professional ways. And so one of the things I urge everybody to do, if you’re privileged enough to be a source of opportunity for others, you know, look around to who needs opportunities. And increasingly, we’re finding people who are refugees, you know, including from like Texas and Florida and the United States, especially people doing qualitative, critical CRT, whatever. But also from abroad, you know, so this is a network of people who should be caring about each other at this particular moment. And I really hope that for everybody who is not yet attacked and is still in a position of privilege to welcome people into their institutions, please try to do that. And for those of you who need to be on the run for various reasons, I hope this is a network that will help you.
Bethany Berger
I saw Malcolm and then Valerie.
Malcolm Feeley
I think there’s one problem with growth and that is cost. So I would hope that the Law and Society Association could help give birth to more national and regional law and society associations and then use the periodic, global meeting as an umbrella organization that brings in those various regional and social groups. So again, I’ll emphasize the importance of the Asian Law and Society Association that grew out of the kernel of the CRN here. And I would love to see that mobilized. Cost is a big factor, just a big factor. And that probably goes a long way to explaining the one shot appearances at the at the meetings.
Valerie Hans
In my first years as an attendee at Law and Society Association meetings, the meetings were small. They were nearly all white people. And they were nearly all people from the United States. And I think it was the prescience of early leaders in the Law and Society Association that they paid attention to pipeline, that the graduate student workshop was so central in really creating a place for people who would not only be disciplinary scholars, but really able to take on and incorporate into their own work the multiple ways that people in our association look at law. So I think that has been so important and so critical and, has to be really continued, as you suggest.
Laura Beth Nielsen
So, I think this is all really good. And I just want to, like, fill folks in on some things that have been happening because, we haven’t had a communications person for a little while. We’ve rotated out of being at UMass Amherst. We’re now our own employing organization. And as a result, we’ve done a lot of financial organizing and volunteers. When I came in as president, Penny Andrews had instituted the Coordinator of Global Affairs board level position. The International Affairs Committee has a great pipeline and it rotates, it’s a model for other CRNs and that started with the seed money from NSF for the CRNs. And now, our global meetings are that hub. In Portugal, we had a meeting of the heads of, it was like 24 law and society associations, five on the continent of Africa, one from almost every European country, Canada. So there are now networks and ways to attract funding. And the second thing that’s happened is that we have established this endowment, and I want to tell folks about it, through some really excellent financial practices led by Howie Erlanger when he was treasurer and Bob Nelson was treasurer. We now have endowed a big portion of some funds that we have that will now forever be kicking off, somewhere in the $100 to $200,000 range to start, for research and collaborative community building at LSA. So there will be an announcement about this, and folks can apply and begin to build things like the intranet, like the global affairs, what they’re doing, like, whatever other folks want to be doing to build community outside of the meeting or in between meetings, using technology to try to do these things. So I think we’re making a lot of great structural strides.
Also not mentioned yet is the Law and Society Association/ABF partnership for the doctoral fellowships that are held in residence at the ABF. It’s been going coming up on 20 years now. So I think the Association, sort of where people’s energies are, we’re building structures to sustain us for a long time, and hopefully the elections will go in such a way that we can do that.
I would also argue that, just for survival of the institution, and I talked about this at my presidential address last year so I won’t go on and on, but I think we have to be prepared to produce a public facing, positive vision of what law can do.
Bethany Berger
So Michele and then Malcolm.
Malcolm Feeley
I just want to give a shout out to the American Bar Foundation. It led the quantum jump into the international arena when its president, Bill Felstiner, committed $100,000, when he didn’t have the authority to do so–he was a little worried about that–to support that law in action. You don’t always want people to follow the law, right? And he committed $100,000 to working along with Rick Abel that created the meeting in Amsterdam, the first international meeting. And it was a risky business. Bill was very worried, and particularly because Erhard Blankenburg was spending the money as if it was a bottomless pit. At any rate, the Law and Society owes the ABF and Bill Felstiner an enormous debt.
Michele Goodwin
So, as we conclude, and I know you all may have concluding remarks, I also want to flag stewardship. We are, depending upon how you think about it, large, or small when you think about our staff, and the stewardship has been exemplary. Through these various presidents that sit up here, we’ve worked across different staff and in different years, but our staff usually stay. And I really want to just commend our staff, our excellent staff. And could you all give them a round of applause, please?
Because these meetings don’t happen without them. And that’s also good financial stewardship that ends up being critically important so that we can keep the doors open and do what we do. We’re able to convene folks domestically and abroad with a staff that’s smaller than a handful of people, and that’s extraordinary when you think about it. So many other organizations that pull together people like this, that manage and maintain like this, have a staff that’s at least triple of what ours has been. And so, I think it’s important to acknowledge, and we’re so grateful that they are part of this journey with us. And so back over to you, Seth and Bethany.
Seth Davis
So I want to say a few words by way of concluding, and I think the first word, and perhaps the most important words that can come out of my mouth now are just thank you. As someone, again, who has been coming to Law and Society for about a decade. Thank you. Thank you for the Association you’ve built. We heard a lot about the importance of supporting one another. Kim, for example, highlighted that especially in this time of challenges to facticity, this time of challenges to legality, right, this time of challenges to the rule of law, this time of pernicious circulation of ideas across the globe. And as someone who has felt very supported by Law and Society over the last decade or so, thank each of you for building this Association, for growing it, and for your legacies, which those of us who will continue to participate in the coming decades have a great responsibility to do our best to try to carry forward. So the first thing I want to say is thank you.
The second thing I want to say is to highlight many of the powerful points that were made about the crises and the challenges that we face here, in this time, June 2024, in this space. In the American West. When we think about, and Michele, this picks up on one of your points, the ongoing crises around megadrought, around water, around water rights, among those around native reserved water rights, and what the battles over law and legal change mean for the lives of people in these spaces, whether it’s in Colorado, the American West, I think Law and Society has so much to bring to how we think about those challenges, including, it seems to me, one of the lessons I leave this panel with is an insistence on facticity, and an insistence on challenging and continuing, as always, in that classic law and society theme to highlight that gap between the law on the books and what is said in the opinions in the case books, and maybe what is gestured at in some of the carefully crafted notes that might even be more carefully crafted, but then what is obviously, central to each of your bodies of scholarship.
And I would say, the final thing to bring us to a close, especially as we end all of our time together as an Association at our annual meeting this year, in addition to emphasizing the insistence on facticity and what’s really happening, I would say emphasizing the importance of collaboration is another lesson that came out of these remarks. I mean, how many times did you all talk about the CRNs, right? And how important that has been to the global reach of the Law and Society Association, to the lives and the work of so many of us in this room, to how we think about what it is we are doing as scholars, what our scholarly identity is, what the opportunities are, for scholarship and for dialog and for working together.
And it strikes me that my second and third points are actually quite closely connected in ways that many of you have already gestured at. But in a time when there are so many crises and challenges coming out of collaboration among other networks and other groups and associations of people, it is so important for us to remember the value of collaboration and the importance of things as concrete as the CRNs.
I will conclude again by saying thank you. I hope the audience will join me in thanking our illustrious panel.