Institutionalising Interpersonal Ideas in Law

How can we best deploy law so as to have positive effects in the social world? This question is at the heart of legal scholarship. In this lecture, I revisit a familiar and widely researched aspect of contemporary legal reality – expanding and increasingly complex regulatory frameworks in criminal law and abutting areas of governance – to ask how we might best pursue the project of constraining, rationalising or even reversing these developments to improve their social impact. I suggest that the research evidence points towards giving greater attention to the language framing legal or other regulatory standards, and argue that we should pay attention to the coordinating and communicative potential of legal institutionalisations of ideas which find their primary reference point in extra‐legal discourse. Such concepts have played a key role in the common law, and occupy a central position in legal philosophy, yet until recently their practical importance in shaping legal governance has been eclipsed by concern with the institutional frameworks and vectors of interest within which legal regimes co‐evolve. I argue that scholarship on the development of law amid the interplay of interests and institutional frameworks itself suggests that ideas should hold a key place in the legal imagination.