The Cultural Study of Law and Social Crisis

This article reviews cultural sociological approaches to law and considers how they may sharpen analysis of social crises. As the United States faces myriad law-related crises, such as rising authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and police violence, the cultural study of law has become an urgent endeavor. Culture constitutes and shapes law, especially in unsettled times. Five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. Future research would benefit from more precise considerations of how rules and norms operate in unsettled times. One way forward is specifying how frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness shape and are shaped by changing rules and norms. Moreover, future research could leverage each concept to sharpen understandings of social control, inequality, and regulatory compliance in understudied contexts, along understudied axes of stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the law.