JOURNAL: Traces. Journal of Humanities nr. 27/2, 2014: Thinking with Law

Tracés. Revue de Sciences Humaines (ENS Éditions) published its latest issue on "Thinking with law".

Presentation:

Confronted with lawyers’ long cherished postulate of the autonomy of law and and of its utter « isolation » from the social world, social scientists have often been deterred from investigating legal thought as such. On the other hand, law faculties – particularly French ones —have proved rather reluctant to take up insights from sociology, anthropology and history into their curriculums. However, the last two decades have been witness to significant changes. Setting foot on legal soil, an increasing number of adventurous social scientists have tackled issues regarding both the social uses of law and the technicalities of its machinery. This issue of Tracés gives a snapshot of this changing relationship between law and the social sciences, thereby hinting at promising new prospects for research. Several papers examine how critical thinking has profited from defining law not as a mere instrument of domination, but also as a resource for defining, analysing and occasionally opposing a given situation. Other papers show this shift of perspective to be contingent on a better command of legal operations — e.g. legal fictions or legal qualifications — by social scientists and on their specific understanding of legal reasoning. Getting a better grasp of law might therefore require two tasks: first, combining an attention to the political uses of law with an analysis of the lawyers’ paraphernalia of formal and technical devices; secondly, discriminating more acutely between different types of normativity, in other words offering a comparative history of legal concepts and legal evolution.

 Contents:

"Droit et sciences sociales : les espaces d’un rapprochement" (Guillaume Calafat, Arnaud Fossier & Pierre Thévenin)

"Comment la sociologie peut déplier le droit" (Arnaud Esquerre)

"Peut-on dépasser le droit civil ? Les controverses juridiques autour de la réparation des dommages de guerre (1914-1919)" (Guillaume Richard)

"Le code en tant qu’accomplissement pratique. Respécification ethnométhodologique et cas d’étude égyptien" (Baudouin Dupret)

"L’invention du droit en Occident. Une lecture d’Aldo Schiavone" (Thibaud Lanfranchi)

"Le droit au service de l’égalité ? Comparaison des sociologies du droit de la non-discrimination française et états-unienne" (Vincent-Arnaud Chappe)

"Gender and judging, ou le droit à l’épreuve des études de genre" (Arthur Vuattoux)

"Les droits de l’homme : un cas limite pour le positivisme juridique" (Anna Zielinska)

"Du droit comme discours et comme dispositif" (Sonia Desmoulins-Canselier)

"John Dewey et l’expérience du droit. La philosophie juridique à l’épreuve du pragmatisme " (Liora Israël et Jean Grosdidier)

"Gouvernement-manageur et citoyens-consommateurs. Le cas du Criminal Justice Act 1991" (Nicolas Lacey)

"Indisponibilité, service public, usage. Trois concepts fondamentaux pour le « commun » et les « biens communs" (Paolo Napoli)

"Le droit en situation. Entretien avec Pierre Lascoumes" (Guillaume Calafat/Arnaud Fossier)

More information (fulltext-acces to the introductory article, abstracts) on revues.org or cairn.info (fulltext for subscribers).