Chapter 7: Sociology of law and science

• Main Author: Cloatre, Emilie (auth)
• Other Authors: Pickersgill, Martyn (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK Edward Elgar Publishing 2020
• Subjects: LAQ; JHB; GBC
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

Sociologies of law and science are increasingly intertwined, offering an important analytic platform from which the join workings of legal and scientific processes can be apprehended and interrogated. This chapter attends to scholarship that has brought together the critical assessment of legal and scientific endeavours, and illustrates how it enabled the breaking of new ground. In particular, the chapter illuminates how new conceptual and methodological engagements have made apparent some of the political dynamics that determine how law functions in societies, and how scientific and legal practices can feed off each other in strengthening pre-existing relationships of institutional power. If the sociology of science has to a great extent enabled legal scholars to approach science as a much less uncertain object than they may have done otherwise, scholarship in law and science has also contributed to destabilizing understandings of the ontology of law - adding new insights into the many ways in which legal authority gets constructed, sustained or defined.