<i>Jurisprudence and Socio‐Legal Studies: Intersecting Fields</i> By RogerCotterrell, London: Routledge, 2024, 252 pp., £37.99

As an undergraduate law student, some years ago, disenchanted with the answers (and the questions) stored in the main rooms of law, I found myself in the research annexe of a university library. Conspicuously set apart from the doctrinal, the location of this repository of legal knowledge was emblematic of the supplementary – even marginal – status that law in context, broadly conceived, still held in some places. And yet, for me, this was a central space of exploration, discovery, and academic growth.1 It takes time to think about where one's research fits (or does not fit) within existing literatures – and for those drawn to interdisciplinary approaches, this is perhaps even more so.2 During my pupal phase in the annexe, I read widely and wildly – an aleatoric approach given that I did not yet know what I did not know.3 But three books proved for me intellectually transformative. The first was a mottled copy of Zenon Bańkowski and Geoff Mungham's Images of Law, a radical and anarchic manifesto that looked to have been produced on a typewriter; it was a book that felt dangerous, but exciting, just to hold.4 So too, though very differently, Jiří Přibáň’s Legal Symbolism presented an entirely novel (to me) way of thinking about law.5 The last, and perhaps most personally influential, was Roger Cotterrell's The Sociology of Law.6 It revealed a wealth of scholarship, unveiling the legal significance of writers better known for their contributions elsewhere, and, moreover, of scholars otherwise rarely spoken about in Anglophone law schools. There was a vastness here – a bewildering range of schools of thought, approaches, and methodologies to address many of the same dilemmas faced in (and because of) legal orders around the world. The Sociology of Law was my window to a world of law in context, allowing me to find fields and individual scholars dedicated to the kinds of issues that seemed crucial to me, but that were often overlooked elsewhere. It was also a text that began to structure my piecemeal understanding of the discipline into something more academically rigorous. To communicate effectively such complex material to a novitiate is testament to Cotterrell's enviable ability to write for multiple audiences simultaneously – from disaffected undergraduates to established scholars. And the book exemplified his characteristic style, one of succinctness and precision – but with a breadth of scope and an always impressive intellectual ambition. Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Studies, Cotterrell's latest book, is no different. It is a text that demands consideration of disciplinary borderlands. Of course, over a coruscating 50-year career, he has often encouraged readers to take academic boundaries and intellectual intersections seriously. In his preface, Cotterrell notes that this book in part draws on, reworks, revises, and expands on a number of previous publications. There is a sense in which this tome is the culmination of many years’ reflections – hopefully not a denouement, but a pulling together of many threads all the same. Cotterrell's specific interest here is the distinctness, and hitherto separateness, of jurisprudence and sociology of law, and his intention is to put them into conversation with each other. This requires him first to delineate and demarcate the fields of sociology of law – and socio-legal studies – in addition to that of jurisprudence. With that task of intellectual cartography complete, he can then turn to mapping the intersections between them. But Cotterrell also engages with a temporal dimension here – what these fields were, what they are (and their development towards this moment), and what they may (or ought to) become in the years ahead. In this way, Cotterrell's ambitions are akin to four-dimensional chess. Only then can he begin to perturb and unsettle the ought and the is, the juristic and the social scientific, the normative and the descriptive, the legal and the sociological. Quite apart from substantive distinctions, terminology itself is understandably a tricky feature in such a work. Socio-legal studies (often abbreviated to SLS by Cotterrell) and sociology of law are at times treated together as ‘socio-legal’. Additionally, indeed, ‘SLS’ is also used as an umbrella term, one denoting the sum of socio-legal studies, law and society scholarship, and sociology of law. Though this could be confusing for some, Cotterrell regularly provides clarification whether ‘socio-legal’ is being used inclusive of sociology of law or not. Furthermore, while the label ‘jurisprudence’ may to certain readers denote legal philosophy, for Cotterrell it refers to the theory of jurists. In turn, he defines ‘jurists’ as ‘theoretically minded lawyers serving the interests of preserving and optimising their own legal system and others with which they are concerned, guided by an idea of what law is and should be’ (p. 82). Cotterrell structures his account in three parts: ‘A Terrain of Socio-Legal Inquiry’, ‘Juristic Radicals as Socio-Legal Pioneers’, and ‘Mapping Intersecting Fields’. It is an unapologetically wide-ranging account, weaving together a panoply of topics and themes, some familiar and others a welcome surprise. Nevertheless, the chapters are characteristically concise and clear – a feature that ensures that Cotterrell's intricate theses remain accessible to a broad audience of advanced students and academics from numerous disciplines, including sociology of law, socio-legal studies, jurisprudence, and sociology. In his introduction, Cotterrell begins the task of articulating and contextualizing the disciplines under consideration. He argues that sociology of law is not a sub-discipline of sociology, but rather one that grew semi-autonomously alongside it (pp. 6–7). Certainly, this accords with Håkan Hydén's view that sociology of law is ‘more than a branch on the tree of sociology’.7 So too Cotterrell notes that ‘as an avowed social science discipline distinct from juristic studies and from the law school as an institution, [it] has often struggled to find an obvious institutional home in Western universities’ (p. 5). As to jurisprudence, Cotterrell acknowledges that the jurists examined in Part II are neither the best known nor representative of the discipline, but rather that they are intended as ‘case studies from a jurisprudential world’ (p. 9). Contrasting SLS and jurisprudence, Cotterrell contends that with early SLS (particularly socio-legal studies) ‘the legal imagination was turning very clearly outwards’, while simultaneously, jurisprudence moved in the opposite direction – inwards – ‘towards the armchair abstractions of the philosopher's study, towards a conscious legal introversion and away from juristic curiosity about the empirical complexity of law's changing social environments’ (p. 9, emphasis in original). Sociology of law is centrally concerned with action – meaningful social behaviour – but that does not mean it cannot say important things about law as ideas, in whatever fields of social action these ideas are found. Seen in this perspective, sociology of law seeks neither to replace jurisprudence nor to operate without reference to lawyers’ concerns. (p. 35) From ideas to values, Chapters 3 and 4 are an exhortation to consider the possible role of values in SLS. Alongside fascinating notes on culture as a research area – its internal and external varieties, its openings and its closures – Cotterrell clarifies his framing of jurisprudence as ‘best understood as a committed, value-oriented enterprise of jurists’ (p. 39). And Chapter 5, ‘Socio-Legal Studies and the Law School’, explores disciplinarity and the troubled reception of disciplines within the university contextualized with notes on Cotterrell's own education and disciplinary straddling. Part II marks Cotterrell's turn to jurisprudence. As previously noted, he distinguishes jurisprudence from legal philosophy and treats ‘jurist’ here in a particular sense (Chapter 6). He depicts both SLS and jurisprudence as ‘bricolage’ endeavours, stating that ‘SLS takes from the social sciences whatever is needed to study law as an empirical social phenomenon in time and place’ (p. 83). However, he distinguishes sociology of law – given its semi-autonomous development alongside sociology – from other, perhaps more kleptomaniacal, approaches. No less provocative are the ‘maverick’ jurists Cotterrell chooses to examine: Ehrlich, Leon Petrażycki, Santi Romano, and Vilhelm Lundstedt. While explicitly non-representative, for some readers this particular bricolage may seem overly eclectic. Nevertheless, the chapters that follow are Cotterrell at his most incandescent, as he interweaves biographical, geographical, and historical observations with the diverse intellectual offerings from his assemblage of renegade jurists. Completing the triptych, Cotterrell concludes with three chapters examining further disciplinary linkages, points of intersection, and areas of common interest (even if with different ends in mind and means along the way). Janus-faced, Cotterrell never abandons the old in his analysis, nor does he fail to search for sites of possible collaboration in looking to the future. His final chapter, ‘Linked Futures: Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Studies’, contains a valuable critique of socio-legal studies (pp. 200–203). But again, his approach is neither prescriptive nor proscriptive; rather, it is conciliatory and cooperative, acknowledging the plurality and vibrancy of socio-legal studies as ‘an intellectual spectrum, one end of which lies in the juridical, the other in the realm of social theory’ (p. 203). And the themes of cross-cutting relevance that he highlights for greater interdisciplinary engagement in future reveal that his thesis is more a humanist programme than it is an intellectual exercise. Cotterrell's work is always thought provoking, and, owing to the breadth of the text's themes, different readers will no doubt take away a variety of insights. Personally, the theme of disciplinary identity emerged as one of the most interesting and – given the book's central thesis of interdisciplinary communication – also one of its most intractable dilemmas. To look within in self-reflection can be a healthy process. For example, Cotterrell (echoing Reza Banakar) has argued that ‘the identity of sociology of law needs clarification, not only for intellectual reasons to locate it on the map of social inquiry, but also to assess its ongoing significance as a research enterprise’.8 However, introspection can devolve into an identity crisis.9 Perhaps disciplines, much like people, may experience an existential crisis along the life-course. In both cases, I suggest, there is felt a need to document one's history, to find out where one came from, and to reach out to long-lost relatives. In a series of workshops,10 journal articles,11 and a forthcoming book,12 the ‘Socio-Legal Trajectories’ project may be seen as fulfilling this purpose. And while a comparative history of sociology of law has not yet been written, as Cotterrell notes in this book, the recent creation of a new Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) Working Group on the theme suggests that more work in this vein will soon follow. [s]ocio-legal studies was always oppositional, you could almost define it as something that is not doctrinal – as something that isn't, the ‘other’, rather than something that is. So, one of the ongoing challenges of socio-legal studies is what is it?13 Categorizing and defining disciplines is always fraught with difficulties and indeed politics. Socio-legal studies, sociology of law, and law and society scholarship are – if not ‘essentially contested’14 – fields that compete, conflict, and collaborate internally and externally as dynamic practices with rich traditions. How then to conceive of such relationships? Are socio-legal studies and sociology of law synonyms, siblings, or descendants from a common ancestor? Are they substantively different or is this a distinction without a difference? Are these distinct traditions into which one is inculcated based on geographical location and place of education? Or perhaps it is simply an affective matter of self-identification? [s]ocio-legal studies now is usually seen as a wider reaching-out – beyond the intellectual traditions of sociology of law that are significantly rooted in sociology as a discipline – into many knowledge fields in the social and human sciences and the humanities that can illuminate the nature of law.18 A century has passed since these scholars of genius left us their intellectual legacy. But this temporal distance does not make them irrelevant now; it reveals them as master mapmakers of the whole vast social terrain of modernity (in which all contemporary ideas of law have been formed). (p. 74) By contrast, socio-legal studies based in the United Kingdom (UK) may be seen to engage with its foundational authors far less than sociology of law – despite the comparative recentness of its history. One might critique this as a tendency towards presentism, and a temporal shallowness – something that Cotterrell similarly suggests (p. 80). But if the observation passes muster, one explanation for this might be that the history of socio-legal studies in the UK is more radical than sometimes thought (pp. 3–5). Given its emergence in the 1960s, amid an intellectual maelstrom of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonial praxis, the ‘oppositional’ character of the discipline may equally speak to a certain counter-hegemonic strain deep within its DNA. Traditionality is neither inherently good nor bad; it is, however, different. And this difference has considerable potential to shape disciplinary trajectories. A discipline that is less beholden to the authoritative presence of its past enjoys flexibility but can more easily become rudderless. It is more capable of experimentation, of revolutionary reformulations, and of embracing novel currents in the ebb and flow of scholarly interest.21 While some of these will stand the test of time, others may quickly be forgotten (p. 74). Indeed, an absence of traditionality – or other theoretical anchoring – might render a field more susceptible to the perils of the momentarily popular.22 Moreover, without such a centripetal force, fragmentation may become inevitable given the pressures of ever-greater specialization. One potential trajectory, therefore, may be constellations of networks of scholars, with manifold methodologies and methods, operating in an increasingly post-disciplinary fashion. What then does the future hold for sociology of law? Could it follow a similar trajectory – or might paths here diverge? Přibáň argues for a sociology of law that recognizes points of convergence and divergence between cognate fields.23 As a ‘borderland science’, it ‘should lead to the crossing of academic borders’ – for those that exist within SLS (broadly conceived) are ‘porous’.24 Relatedly, Cotterrell's ‘sociological jurisprudence’ can be characterized as an autonomous transdisciplinary sociology – one perhaps less encumbered by its own past.25 After all, as Cotterrell observes elsewhere, ‘intellectual advance in social studies now often occurs by ignoring disciplinary prerogatives, boundaries and distinctions’.26