Law and the Interpretive Turn in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Legal cases are increasingly used in the social sciences as the raw material for social analysis. While this is entirely laudable as a research strategy, the analytical methods used in the social sciences to study cases are too often simplistic and reductionist. Positivism is too often the preferred analytical mode. I argue that the legal texture of cases ought to be retained by social scientists, just as we ought to be more aware of the problematic nature of interpretation, an issue embedded within legal discourse. In contrast to those who contend that the interpretive turn in the social sciences is nihilistic and subjective, I suggest reasons for understanding the interpretive turn as an organized social practice dependent upon social standards of right and wrong. These issues are illustrated by reference to a recent court case involving a corporation that secretly and illegally relocated production so as to avoid its pension obligations.

Restructuring legal geography

“…The second determinist approach to the law that the interpretive approach to law and geography was poised to help scholars correct, according to its proponents, was one which took for granted the law's self-presentation as closed, determinate, aspatial, and wholly formal -the law's status, essentially, as a kind of structure itself, dispensing decisions in accordance with its own internal rules, independent of social or spatial context (Clark, 1985(Clark, , 1989a(Clark, , 1989bBlomley, 1989Blomley, , 1994Blomley and Clark, 1990;Pue, 1990). Proponents of the interpretive approach ascribed this representation of law to the law itself or to legal practitioners, or simply talked about this representation as part of the mainstream understanding of law.…”

Normalising jurisdictional heterotopias through place branding: The cases of Christiania and Metelkova

“…We do not envision a staged acquisition of pre-determined meaning with respect to law and space; rather, we endeavour to appreciate a ''non-violent'' shaping of relationships that bring the space, the law, and the social together. Indeed, legal geography ''investigates the coconstitutive relationship of people, place and law'' (Bennett and Layard, 2015: 406), which finds its springboard in the notion that law is ''anti-geographic'' (Blomley, 1994;Clark, 1989;Delaney, 2000;Pue, 1990). Its distinctive feature is the elegant and detailed attention to ''the complex processes of legal constitutivity'' (Delaney, 2015: 98) and the analysis of the reciprocal or mutual constitutivity of the legal, the social, and the spatial.…”

Critical geographies of citizenship and belonging in Ireland

“…This builds on 'critical legal studies', which examines the ways laws and legal discourses are constitutive of social life, experiences and relations. Over the last twenty years a number of geographers and legal scholars have advanced arguments and accounts that explore the mutual constitution of the legal, the social and the spatial (Blomley, 1994;Blomley, Delaney, and Ford, 2001;Clark, 1989;Cooper, 1998;Delaney, 1998Delaney, , 2004Ford, 1994;Kobayashi, 1995;White, 2001White, , 2002. Law is implicated in everyday social contexts and political struggles and these take place and are articulated over space in concrete social and political contexts.…”