Organised, by Illan Wall and Daniel Matthews, this exploratory workshop on ‘cultural legal studies’ explored some of the key elements. The invite for the workshop read: As Raymond Williams notes, ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1988, 87). Drawing on Williams’ survey of the overlapping and sometimes contradictory senses of this word, three meanings nonetheless stand out: (i) culture as a process of human intellectual, social and aesthetic development through which certain virtues and habits of behaviour are nurtured; (ii) culture as a way of life, identifiable with a particular nation, class or period of history; (iii) culture as artistic creativity, and its attendant institutions and forms of analysis. Scholars working at the intersection of law and the humanities have long taken these three trajectories to be essential to an analysis of lawful relations. Such work moves away from a limited analysis of the legal form to a broader and more dynamic evaluation of law’s role in cultivating habits of behaviour, of defining and reinforcing a given ‘way of life’ – often through the circulation of narratives, images, myths and emblems – as well as law’s role in organising the built environment, and the encounters and attitudes which constitute ‘everyday life’. As Williams notes, the ambivalence of culture as referring to both symbolic and material processes is key to this concept’s protean quality (1988, 91). Drawing on the rich history of legal research that encompasses law and literature, law and aesthetics, studies of law’s affective dimensions, the legal imaginary, and the material expression of law’s normative force, cultural legal studies might be best understood as a distinctive form of legal analysis which intersects with both ‘critical’ and ‘socio-legal’ approaches, but is irreducible to either. Â
Bringing together scholars whose work has made important contributions to these themes, this workshop aimed to identify the scope of this field of inquiry, its objects of study and its strategies of interpretation. What, then, is the promise of cultural legal studies? Participants are invited to reflect on these indicative questions:Â
- What is the analytic value of foregrounding law’s cultural rather than its social, moral, economic or political dimensions?
- What are the intellectual traditions and conceptual resources most relevant to the study of law as an element of culture?
- How might cultural legal studies engage with, and learn from related traditions of scholarship: cultural studies, cultural materialism, cultural criminology, cultural anthropology or cultural history?
- How does cultural legal studies give access to law’s desires and investments, its affective life, and psychic worlds?
- How does foregrounding the visualisation and narrativization of law supplement our understanding of law’s anthropological and/or sociological functions?
The primary aim of this workshop is to outline the scope and promise of cultural legal studies. We will dedicate the final session to thinking about institutionality, mapping the current institutes and centres that work on law, culture and the humanities, with the aim of assessing the potential to constitute a broader organisation within the UK and/or Europe.Â
The workshop took place at Warwick Law School on Tuesday 3 May 2022. Participants included Maria Drakopoulou, Panu Minkinnen, Thomas Giddens, Henrique Carvalho, and Valerie Hayaert.
