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36 Law Context: A Socio-Legal J. 12 (2019)
Context and Convergence: Some Remarks on the Law and Society Movement

handle is hein.journals/lwincntx36 and id is 14 raw text is: LAWIN CONTE r ISSN: 1839-4183 Received January 13, 2019, Date of publication: September 25, 2019, DOI: https://doi.org/10.26826/law-in-context.v36il.82 Context and Convergence: Some Remarks on the Law and Society Movement By Lawrence M. Friedman (Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University, Stanford, Ca. USA) Stanford University, USA ABSTRACT The law and society movement has grown greatly in recent years. It explores two macro-questions: the sources of law, on the one hand, and the impact of law, on the other. It rejects the orthodox view of legal science, but embraces the methods of the social sciences. My own work has, recently, dealt with the issue of legal impact; and has also delved into socio-legal history. Historical study can act as a kind of control group for law and society studies; comparative and cross-cultural studies can perform the same function. Studies of modern legal system demonstrate a high de- gree of convergence-in an interconnected world, societies share both problems and solutions. Socio-legal studies themselves have converged; and share a common intellectual language. Keywords - Human rights, Impact, Socio-legal history, Comparative legal culture, Law and Society movement, Convergence Disclosure statement - No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. License - This work is under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Suggested citation: Friedman, L.M. 2019. Context and Convergence: Some Remarks on the Law and Society Movement. Law in Context, 36 (1): 12-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26826/law-in-context.v36i1.82 I It was a pleasure, and an honor, to be asked to con- tribute to the first issue of the renewed Law in Context. I want to begin by congratulating the scholars who made the rebirth of this journal possible; and extend a hearty welcome to this new member of the family of outlets for studies of law and society. The name of the journal is especially apt. Context is at the heart of law and society studies. Context-thatis, the real world. The world where legal systems actually behave; and where people in society experience legal systems, and legal institutions, as part of their lives. Context means to explore what these sys- tems and institutions mean in society; and how societies respond to the work output of legal systems. The world of law and society scholarship is a big tent- sprawling, vivid, colorful, exciting. I think of it as a kind of great academic circus, with thousands of performers, working in every corner of the world; men and women using many different techniques, approaches, strategies; scholars attacking many distinct questions, to which they give distinct answers. The law and society movement is growing, expanding, flexing its muscles; it is already a vital and salient movement; and its future, I think, is extremely bright. The movement does not have a long history. It has its founding figures: Eugen Ehrlich, for example, and (very Law in context, Vol 36, Issue 1, 2019 12

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