A Research Network based at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory

Jen Hendry, Christian Boulanger and Naomi Creutzfeldt have teamed up to work on a book project to explore socio-legal connections as they develop. Although the focus for the project is the UK and Germany, we are interested to add more countries and contexts to the mix as we progress our fieldwork.

The project in a nutshell

As we explain on our project website, our bi-national research project examines the contours and cultures in the field of law and society in Germany and the UK. It employs comparative, self-reflective, and empirical methods alongside socio-legal theory to undertake a comprehensive and critical mapping of a disputed and ever-evolving terrain. We are addressing a real research gap, since very little comparative scholarship exists on the emergence and the state of law and society studies in the UK and Germany, and scant data is available on research environments and communities upon which such analyses could be based. We also want to contribute to the self-reflective study of academia as a social practice, with the result that, alongside the hard numbers, we are interested in personal narratives, which we will collect through in-depth interviews with a diverse set of socio-legal scholars.

A Visualisation of Germany-UK Socio-Legal Citations

The Survey 

As the comparative data does not yet exist, we need your help to produce it! We invite you to take part in a survey that will collect anonymized data on academic biographies and identities of socio-legal scholars, the institutional landscape and context, teaching and recruiting new scholars, and your attitudes on the development of the field in general. This is not a one-way street: we will keep you informed about exciting discoveries and share the data after completion of the project, so that it can support and encourage even more comparative research.

 

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE SURVEY

 

Thank you! 

    Jen, Naomi, and Christian                         

 

For any questions please contact: sociolegaltrajectories@lhlt.mpg.de