Looking for Law in Social Policy: Why Socio-Legal Studies Ignores Issues of State Economic Distribution

• In Event: 241 - Regular Session. Law and Society

Abstract

While socio-legal scholars have long argued for an expansive understanding of what counts as “law,” they have primarily focused their attention on laws in which the state regulates behavior, and largely ignored laws in which the state distributes resources, goods, and services. Although our explicit definitions of law would classify both regulatory and distributive statutes as laws, scholars implicitly think of distributive laws—involving health, poverty, education, food, work—as “policies.” Analyzing patterns over time in articles published in the Law & Society Review, we document a striking phenomenon. In the late 1960s, scholars studied a broad range of both regulatory and distributive laws. But socio-legal scholarship involving issues of state economic distribution dramatically declined starting in 1970, just as the field of public policy was taking shape. This paper traces the history of the exclusion of distributive law from scholarly analysis in socio-legal studies. We argue that the reluctance of sociolegal scholars to study issues of state economic distribution after the 1960s reflects in part the absence of a positive social theory about the relationship between law and social welfare. Socio-legal scholarship has been trapped instead in a scholarship of critique that has failed to systematically examine the role of liberal legalism in creating, sustaining, and reinforcing economic inequality. The paper concludes by drawing on the concept of socioeconomic rights to illustrate how the study of state economic distribution might profoundly expand the contribution of sociolegal studies to the understanding of the roots and persistence of economic inequality.

Authors

• Sandra R. Levitsky, University of Michigan

• Rachel Kahn Best, University of Michigan

• Jessica Garrick, University of Michigan