Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T01:56:03.379Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A New Social Constructionism for Sociolegal Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Elizabeth Mertz
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In this essay I make a case for what I call a “moderate” and also an “empirically grounded” social constructionist approach, which I conceptualize as a further development of numerous strands of a longstanding and rich tradition. I argue that this approach, one I see as emergent now in cross-disciplinary work like that presented in this Symposium, can help to move scholarly discourse past the impasses posed by dichotomous, either/or thinking about law, society, and epistemology. To orient those unfamiliar with the pertinent scholarship, I begin with a sketch of the intellectual traditions and issues involved.

Type
Conclusion
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 5: Symposium: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies , 1994 , pp. 1243 - 1266
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

I thank Frank Munger, Bryant Garth, Carol Greenhouse, Jane Larson, Sally Merry, Ray Solomon, and Chris Tomlins for discussions that helped me to clarify my thinking on many of the points discussed in this essay. Frank, Bryant, and Carol were willing readers of earlier versions at lightning turnaround rates; I am very much in their debt. Thanks also to Bette Sikes for expert editing. I acknowledge the assistance of Christine Garza in guiding my initial readings of the exciting works of Latina scholars to which I refer here. I also thank Shepley Orr for a similar kind of introduction to the works of Gergen and his colleagues.

References

REFERENCES

Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. (1990) Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.Google Scholar
Balkin, J. M. (1994) “Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice,” 92 Michigan Law Rev. 1131.Google Scholar
Beidelman, T. (1966) “Swazi Royal Ritual,” 36 Africa 373.Google Scholar
Bell, Derrick (1987) And We Are Not Saved. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Berger, Peter, & Luckmann, Thomas (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday & Co.Google Scholar
Bohannon, Paul (1969) “Ethnography and Comparison in Legal Anthropology,” in Nader, L., ed., Law in Culture and Society. Chicago: Aldine.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Boyle, James (1985) “The Politics of Reason: Critical Legal Theory and Local Social Thought,” 133 Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Rev. 685.Google Scholar
Brenneis, Don (1984) “Straight Talk and Sweet Talk: Political Discourse in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community,” in Brenneis, D. & Myers, F., eds., Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific. New York: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Brenneis, Don, (1987) “Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community,” 14 American Ethnologist 236.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles (1986) Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, Charles, & Bauman, Richard (1992) “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power,” 2 J. of Linguistic Anthropology 131.Google Scholar
Bumiller, Kristin (1988) The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Bumiller, Kristin, (1983) “Gramsci, the State, and the Place of Law,” in Sugarman, D., ed., Legality, Ideology, and the State. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chandler, Nahum (1991) “The Force of the Double: A Reading of W. E. B. Du Bois on the Question of the African American Subject.” Presented at 1991 American Anthropological Association Meetings, Chicago.Google Scholar
Chandler, Nahum, (1993) “Between,” 20 Assemblage 26.Google Scholar
Chandler, Nahum (forthcoming) “The Signification of the Autobiographical in the Work of W. E. B. DuBois,” in Lavie, S. & Swedenburg, T., eds. Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Chandler, Nahum (n.d.) “The African-American Example: The Concept of Race and Diasporic African Identities” J. of Research in African Literatures, (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard (1989) “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Starr & Collier 1989.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard, (1983) “Representing Authority in Victorian England,” in Hobshawn, E. & Ranger, T., eds., The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Collier, Jane, & Yanagisako, Sylvia (1987) Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, Comaroff, John (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conley, John, & O'Barr, William M. (1990) Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Marianne (1994) “Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law,” 19 Law & Social Inquiry 551.Google Scholar
Coombe, Rosemary (1989) “Room for Manoeuver: Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies,” 14 Law & Social Inquiry 69.Google Scholar
Coombe, Rosemary, (1993) “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy,” 6 Canadian J. of Law & Jurisprudence 249.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla (1992) The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Daniel, E. Valentine (1993) “Tea Talk: Violent Measures in the Discursive Practices of Sri Lanka's Estate Tamils,” 35 Comparative Studies in Society & History 568.Google Scholar
Delgado, Richard (1989) “Storytelling for Oppositionalists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” 87 Michigan Law Rev. 2411.Google Scholar
Domínguez, Virginia (1986) White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Domínguez, Virginia, (1989) People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
DuBois, W. E. B. (1969 [1903]) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
DuBois, W. E. B., (1968 [1940]) Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile (1915) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile (1933) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile (1938) The Rules of the Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Harry (1992) “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession,” 91 Michigan Law Rev. 34.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan (1992) “Conformity, Contestation, and Resistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness,” 26 New England Law Rev. 73.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha A. (1988) “Dominant Discourse, Professional Language, and Legal Change,” 101 Harvard Law Rev. 727.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha A. (1991) The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha A., (1994) The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth-Century Tragedies. New York: Roudedge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, trans. Gordon, C. et al. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Gee, James (1985) “The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style,” 167 J. of Education 9.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford (1963) Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gergen, Kenneth (1990) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gergen, Kenneth, & Davis, K. E., eds. (1985) The Social Construction of the Person. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glendon, Mary Ann (1994) A Nation under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max (1965) The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max (1967) The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia. 2d Ed. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio (1983) The Modern Prince and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio, (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol J. (1986) Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol J., Yngvesson, Barbara, & Engel, David (1994) Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. McCarthy, T.. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Erik, & Ranger, T. (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Husserl, Edmund (1946) “Phenomenology,” 17 Encyclopedia Brittanica. 14th Ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lazarus-Black, Mindie, & Hirsch, Susan, eds. (1994) Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance. New York: Roudedge.Google Scholar
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1963) Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, Catharine (1993) “Reflections on Law in the Everyday Life of Women,” in Sarat & Kearns 1993.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael W. (1992) “Resistance, Reconstruction, and Romance in Legal Scholarship,” 26 Law & Society Rev. 733.Google Scholar
McConnell, Joyce (1992) “Incest as Conundrum: Judicial Discourse on Private Wrong and Public Harm,” 1 Texas J. of Women & the Law 143.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (1990) Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth (1988) “The Uses of History: Language, Ideology, and Law in the United States and South Africa,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 661.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth, (1992) “Creative Acts of Translation,” 4 Yale J. of Law & Humanities 165.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth, (1993) “Learning What to Ask: Metapragmatic Factors and Methodological Reification,” in Lucy, J., ed., Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth (1994a) “Legal Language: Pragmatics, Poetics, and Social Power,” 23 Annual Rev. of Anthropology 435.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth, (1994b) “Legal Loci and Places in the Heart: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies,” 28 Law & Society Rev. 971.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth (forthcoming) “Linguistic Constructions of Difference and History in the U.S. Law School Classroom,” in Greenhouse, C. & Greenwood, D., eds., Democracy and Difference.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth, & Weissbourd, Bernard (1985) “Rule Centrism vs. Legal Creativity,” in E. Mertz & R. Parmentier, Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Messick, Brinkley (1992) The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minow, Martha (1990) Making All the Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Montoya, Margaret (1994) “Mascaras, Trenzas, y Grenas: Un/masking the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,” 17 Harvard Women's Law J. 185.Google Scholar
Moore, Henrietta L. (1988) Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk (1986) Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mukhopadhyay, Carol, & Higgins, Patricia (1988) “Anthropological Studies of Women's Status Revisited: 1977–1987,” 17 Annual Rev. of Anthropology 461.Google Scholar
Olsen, Frances (1983) “The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform,” 96 Harvard Law Rev. 1497.Google Scholar
Ortner, Sherry, & Whitehead, Harriet (1981) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. (1980) “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding,” 5 Signs 389.Google Scholar
Rosen, Lawrence (1989) The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Said, Edward, (1983) The World, The Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1990) “Off to Meet the Wizard: Beyond Validity and Reliability in the Search for a Post-empiricist Sociology of Law,” 15 Law & Social Inquiry 155.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Kearns, Thomas (1993) “Beyond the Great Divide: Forms of Scholarship and Everyday Life,” in Sarat, A. & Kearns, T., eds., Law in Everyday Life. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schutz, Alfred (1970) On Phenomenology and Social Relations, ed. H. Wagner. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James, (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan Wallach (1988) Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1993) “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,” in Lucy, J., ed., Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1979) “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology,” in Clyne, P., Hanks, W., & Hofbauer, C., eds., The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Singer, Joseph (1984) “The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory,” 94 Yale Law J. 1.Google Scholar
Solum, Lawrence (1987) “On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,” 54 Univ. of Chicago Law Rev. 462.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri (1985) “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Guha, R., ed., Subaltern Studies TV: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Starr, June, & Collier, Jane (1989) History and Power in the Study of Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Stigler, James, Shweder, Richard, & Herdt, Gilbert (1990) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher (1993) Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1976) The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max (1947 [1925]) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max, (1958 [1904–5]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, T.. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.Google Scholar
Weissbourd, Bernard, & Mertz, Elizabeth (1985) “Rule-centrism versus Legal Creativity: The Skewing of Legal Ideology through Language,” 19 Law & Society Rev. 623.Google Scholar
White, James Boyd (1990) Justice as Translation. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia J. (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Yngvesson, Barbara (1993) Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Complaint in a New England Court. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar