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Jurisprudence and Socio‐Legal Studies: Intersecting Fields By RogerCotterrell, London: Routledge, 2024, 252 pp., £37.99

Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: As an undergraduate law student, some years ago, disenchanted with the answers (and the questions) stored in the main rooms of law, I found myself in the research annexe of a university library.Conspicuously set apart from the doctrinal, the location of this repository of legal knowledge was emblematic of the supplementary -even marginal -status that law in context, broadly conceived, still held in some places.And yet, for me, this was a central space of exploration, discovery, and academic growth. 1 It takes time to think about where one's research fits (or does not fit) within existing literatures -and for those drawn to interdisciplinary approaches, this is perhaps even more so.2 During my pupal phase in the annexe, I read widely and wildly -an aleatoric approach given that I did not yet know what I did not know.3 But three books proved for me intellectually transformative.The first was a mottled copy of Zenon Bańkowski and Geoff Mungham's Images of Law, a radical and anarchic manifesto that looked to have been produced on a typewriter; it was a book that felt dangerous, but exciting, just to hold. 4 So too, though very differently, Jiří Přibáň's Legal Symbolism presented an entirely novel (to me) way of thinking about law. 5 The last, and perhaps most personally influential, was Roger Cotterrell's The Sociology of Law.6 It revealed a wealth of scholarship, unveiling the legal significance of writers better known for their contributions elsewhere, and, moreover, of scholars otherwise rarely spoken about in Anglophone law schools.There was a vastness here -a bewildering range of schools of thought, 1 J. H.
DOI: 10.1111/jols.12503
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403285253
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