This Special Issue considers the situated and contextualized development of socio-legal, or law and society, scholarship within two materially different legal and academic cultures, namely Germany and the United Kingdom, with a view to achieving a better understanding of why and how such differences in understanding and practice have arisen. The contributions are grouped into three themes. The first reflects upon the influence of institutional contexts and scholarly traditions in terms of the development of those approaches that come under the banner of socio-legal studies. The second features contributions that adopt a comparative perspective in terms of selected areas of law, pointing to notably different approaches taken in Germany and the UK, and considering the development of these respective situations. The third looks at the key contemporary trends, theoretical applications, and methodological approaches taken within both countries’ socio-legal academic contexts.

Under the headings of “Rechtssoziologie” in Germany and “sociolegal studies” in the UK, scholarly traditions have developed that relate law to its social environment. This Article identifies key stages in the development the subject took in both countries and the directions of travel. Comparable milestones were passed, and directions were taken in Germany and the UK. This includes the institutionalization of the subject along the lines of programmatic texts; becoming part of university education; and the establishment of research institutes, academic associations, and specialized journals. The development tells us something beyond sociology of law or sociolegal studies, namely about the relation of law and sociology, the parent disciplines themselves, as well as about academic studies and professional and institutional practice. However, in contrast to the UK, there is still more of a distance between the sociology of law and jurisprudence in Germany.

Cultures of legal and socio-legal scholarship, like legal cultures themselves, are shaped by their respective historical, cultural, economic, and socio-political context. Socio-legal—or law and society—studies are thus pursued and taught differently in different parts of the world. This Article suggests making socio-legal studies the object of comparative research, so as to understand and explain commonalities, differences, and context dependencies in socio-legal scholarship and teaching in different countries. Such comparative endeavors help to translate between different academic languages and to critically reflect upon one’s own research methods and system of legal education. They prove useful for scholars planning research in other parts of the world or engaging in cross-country collaborative research projects, and for research institutions and policymakers involved in reforming research funding and legal education. But how do we go about comparing socio-legal studies? More specifically, why, what, and how do we compare, and what are the challenges that we may face when pursuing such comparative endeavors? This Article gives an overview of potential research questions that a comparison between socio-legal studies may address, the sources that comparativists may draw on, the methods such a comparative endeavor may use to collect and analyze data, and the challenges researchers may face when attempting to compare socio-legal studies in different parts of the world.

Gender in socio-legal teaching and research in Germany is a story of impediments, hindrances, and of singleperson initiatives—my personal history being a part of this. But it is also a story of influences upon the impulse and inspiration to undertake socio-legal work. My Article is therefore influenced by (feminist) standpoint theory (Harding 1991). Germany has had a very conservative family culture and, over the past decades, many of the legal regulations that infringed upon women have had to be adapted, in what was quite a tedious political process, to comply with the German Constitution’s gender equality clause. Only in the past decade has gender awareness in law faculties increased and gained acceptance, usually as a result of greater focus on diversity issues, and anti-discrimination legislation. Obstacles have resulted from a lack of cooperation between the actors in social sciences and law, as well as in academia and gender equality practice, and a lack of understanding between more conservative and more progressive women. Socio-legal research was, and is, needed to deliver empirical evidence and provide theoretical foundations for cultural and legal changes as societies progress towards gender equality. Socio-legal teaching is needed to alert lawyers to necessary change, to enable them to undertake informed critique, and to prepare them to act. There are, however, marked deficits in socio-legal teaching and research on gender. In spite of an increased political acceptance, gender equality is still mainly a women’s project.

In the context of the encounter of UK and German socio-legal studies in this issue, this Article develops preliminary thoughts on a research agenda for the comparative interdisciplinary empirical study of legal doctrine. Based on a working definition of doctrine as an institutionally legitimized practice of making statements on the law, it presents an overview of sociological and comparative theorizing about doctrine in Germany, and of the data and methods being used to study it, in order to identify similar or diverging trends in the UK and elsewhere. This Article aims to show that legal doctrine, which is often regarded by non-lawyers as arcane and/or tedious, is an interesting and important subject for comparative socio-legal research.

Labor law scholars have been receptive to socio legal methods, going beyond doctrinal legal sources and looking to other disciplines including industrial relations, sociology, and history. This Article revisits the development of socio legal labor law scholarship in Germany and the UK in order to understand the different approaches within the context of two different legal and academic cultures, and considers how a comparison can provide new insights at a time when the discipline is in a state of flux. In particular, this Article focuses on how history can provide an entrée into different ways of comparing labor law and labor relations systems. It seeks to start a methodological debate on “how to do” labor law history within the context of the discipline’s socio legal origins. In a final section, it uses insights from history and comparative law in order to develop a new methodology—a “minor comparativism”—which unearths the processes and influences underpinning the historical development of labor law which have hitherto escaped the legal record. Such an approach enables scholars to reassess traditional narratives—a worthwhile endeavor at a time when the future role of labor law in regulating work is under scrutiny.

Since contracts form a basic institution of every legal order, the interdisciplinary orientation of concepts of contracts reveals socio-legal inclinations of a legal order more broadly. Contrasting the UK and US Common Law of contracts with developments under German law, this Article examines the relation between normative and social science approaches, notably rooted in economics, economic sociology, and social theory in the genealogy of contract law. A shared leitmotif over the 20th century has been the drive to account for the societal embeddedness of contract. However, conceptualizations of “Contract and Society” differ considerably between legal orders in their disciplinary ingredients and design. In the US, and to a lesser extent also in the UK, the rather continuous reception of legal realism has paved the way for broad interdisciplinary perspectives on contract law, ranging from classical socio-legal, empirical work (e.g., Macaulay), economics (e.g., Williamson), sociology (e.g., Powell), and critical theory (e.g., Kennedy) to today’s landscape, where essentially instrumental and ideal-normative theories compete. Alternatively, in Germany, where the realist heritage was more ephemeral, the transformations of contract law were processed from within legal discourse and foremost in their effects on private autonomy as conceptualized, for example, in German idealism, discourse theory and critical theory. Similarly, the “constitutionalization” of contract law—even if championed for fostering private law’s reflexivity—has, for the most part, defied a socio-legal orientation. Finally, the Article highlights the path dependencies with which these different starting points translate in current debates around the role of contract in transnational governance.

Sociological approaches to law in both Germany and the UK have been characterized by internal divisions and divergent methodologies and aspirations. While, in the UK, empirical socio-legal studies have been a prominent way of studying how law shapes and is shaped by social institutions, in Germany, the “grand theory” of systemtheoretical approaches to law has had a lasting impact. In this Article, I discuss the epistemological contrast between these two sociological approaches to law by focusing on how they address transnational private regulation. Empirical socio-legal studies share an epistemic commitment to an objective and knowable social reality, and they tend to see human actors as the motors of history. Thus they focus on the interrelational dynamics within Global Value Chains (GVCs), searching for “what works” in transnational private regulation. On the contrary, systemstheory oriented sociological jurisprudence views social reality as constructed and fragmented into the epistemes of different social systems. GVCs are understood as selfreferential normative orders, in which the question of agency and human actors is secondary—the emphasis is on communications and anonymous forces of ordering. Attempting to inspect the possibilities for synthesis, I ask how “big” we can and should think in law and society. I thus attempt to outline an approach that starts from the materiality of social structures to investigate processes beyond individual agency and to uncover elements of normative reconstruction of the particular area of social activity.

This Article looks for signs of Anglo-German life in the literature and practice under-pinning the current move to use “designerly ways” in socio-legal research; and asks whether design has a role to play in nurturing a sense of Anglo-German socio-legal community. It argues that a “sociological imagination” is essential if we are to fully understand possible synergies between design and socio-legal research, and the risks and rewards of activating them; and that while we cannot know what socio-legal research will or ought to look like in the coming months and years we must pay more attention to designing those moments that we are lucky enough to share in person.

This Article considers the development of urban law. It suggests that urban law is socio-legal in its exploration of law’s role in the production of the city and urban life, enabling the study of the city as a distinctive legal entity. Addressing the question “why urban law?,” this Article considers similar debates in geography and urban policy before developing three arguments for studying urban law: (i) urbanism is a vibrant field of scholarly research; (ii) socio-legal research can take an explicitly normative focus in pursuit of improving urban quality; and (iii) at a city scale we can investigate governance concepts of territory, sovereignty and jurisdiction. One of the difficulties with urban law is finding the right level of analysis, covering sufficient legal and empirical detail whilst also making the city legible at an urban scale. Although this tension produces imperfect compromises, accepting the limitations means that we can begin the shared task of developing an intellectual infrastructure, a grammar, for the study of urban law.

This Article provides a novel insight into how earlycareer scholars in the UK may combine different theoretical tools in their research, and the implications that this may have for the socio-legal discipline. This Article draws upon the author’s experience of combining theoretical tools from different schools of thought: Feminist legal theory, Bourdieusian theory, and Actor Network Theory, within the context of recent research into experiences of those representing themselves in family court hearings in England and Wales. Combining these theories for the first time, this Article explores the difficulties, tensions, and benefits of combining tools within socio-legal research and reflects upon the influence of the pedagogical and institutional resources that characterize the socio-legal research environment in the UK. This Article argues that the task of combining different tools provides scholars with the opportunity to work politically, because the process of reconciling tensions between different approaches requires researchers to reflect upon the worldviews that underpin their selected theories. In this sense, it argues that combining different theories within socio-legal research is a political activity, because researchers are required to reflect not only on how theoretical choices may contest, expand, or develop dominant assumptions that characterize socio-legal scholarly traditions.