464 - Regular Session. Law and Society II - Law, Expertise and the Interplay of Professions

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This session explores the evolving role of law in the borderlands between professions. At these fluid frontiers, law simultaneously adjudicates jurisdiction and constructs expertise, shaping both professional projects and professional logics alike. Moreover, as a professional field in its own right, law can never be fully exogenous to such structuration processes, but rather is vulnerable to transformation and reconstitution by the very forces that it purports to govern. Making sense of these interwoven dynamics is a crucial task for socio-legal scholarship in an increasingly professionalized and expertise-encrusted world.

Sub Unit

• Law & Society / Law and Society

Session Organizer

• Mark C. Suchman, Brown University

Presider

• Mark C. Suchman, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• The War on Drugs at the Pharmacy Counter: Frontline Workers Facing Discrepant Institutional Logics - Elizabeth Chiarello, Saint Louis University

• Privacy in Practice: Professions, Laws, Technologies, and the Work of Health Care Delivery - Denise L. Anthony, Dartmouth College; Timothy Patrick Stablein, Dartmouth College

• How Political and Legal Structures Shape “Expertise” in French and American Gay Marriage Debates - Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, University of California-Los Angeles

• The Limits of Science: Explaining the Legitimation of Social Science in the Legal Field - Matthew Clair, Harvard University; Alix Winter, Harvard University

Discussant

• Calvin Morrill, University of California-Berkeley