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Framing the Field of Law's Disciplinary Encounters: A Historical Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Christopher Tomlins
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Abstract

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In this article I address the historical interrelationship of law and social science. I explore the separation of “law” and “social science” during the later 19th century, examine their relationship over the next 50 years, and finally take up their more elaborate post-World War II interaction, culminating in the birth and development of the law and society movement. The narrative focuses on two realms of encounter, the intellectual and the institutional, or “spatial,” and in the latter case on two particular locales—the academy and the state. Histories of the interaction of law and social science have mostly pursued its academic aspect, resulting in a history of encounters expressed primarily as pedagogical disputes. But encounters between law and the social science disciplines are also competitions between distinct languages of state formation. Moments of encounter are moments of rivalry in the state, not simply in the common room. Mostly, I conclude, law wins.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , 2000 , pp. 911 - 972
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This article was first conceived as an element of the American Bar Foundation project “Law's Disciplinary Encounters.” I am grateful to the editors of that project—Bryant G. Garth, Robert L. Nelson, and Victoria Saker Woeste—for their willingness to see it published here. Earlier drafts have been presented for discussion at the American Bar Foundation Conference on Law's Disciplinary Encounters (Chicago 1999), at the Association Canadienne Droit et Societé/Canadian Law and Society Association Annual Meeting (Lake Louise, Alberta 2000), and at faculty workshops at Georgetown University Law Center (1999), the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1999), the Johns Hopkins University History Department (2000), the Green College Law and Society Seminar, University of British Columbia (2000), Tel Aviv University Law Faculty (2000), and Hebrew University, Jerusalem Law Faculty/American Studies Department (2000). I am very grateful to all who took part in these discussions. I owe particular thanks for their comments to Daniel R. Ernst, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, William J. Novak, Dorothy Ross, and the Law and Society Review's referees.

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Case Cited

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