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Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights provided a path-breaking theoretical analysis of what he called the “myth of rights.” Scheingold's key insight was that even though rights were a myth, rights ideologies nevertheless left a significant imprint on American politics. The book charted a research agenda that has now been followed by a wide range of sociolegal scholars. Looking across that diverse body scholarship, I find convergence on two points. First, scholars claim that law and legal ideology contribute to processes of legitimation and to political acquiescence. Second, and seemingly in tension with the first, most people do not appear to believe in idealized legal myths and express only qualified commitments to legal ideals. Most scholars have responded to this tension by downplaying evidence that people have doubts about legal ideals, often treating expressions of doubts as evidence of confusion. As a result, scholars still conclude that residual commitments to legal myths help to explain legitimation and acquiescence. Such moves produce accounts of legal myths that are insufficiently attentive to politics and power. Scholars would do better to return to Scheingold's more ambivalent perspective on the politics of rights in order to understand the political consequences of commitments to rights’ ideologies.

This article develops a methodological framework to support qualitative analyses of legal texts. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities use qualitative methods to study legal phenomena but often overlook formal legal texts as productive sites for analysis. Moreover, when qualitative researchers do analyze legal texts, they rarely discuss the methodological underpinnings that support their approach. A thorough consideration of the methodological underpinnings of qualitative approaches to legal analysis is therefore warranted.

By bringing critical legal theory into conversation with qualitative methodology, this article outlines a set of key principles to inform qualitative approaches to reading the law.

To construct this methodological framework, this article first distinguishes between qualitative approaches to textual analysis and the doctrinal approaches undertaken in legal practice and formal legal scholarship. It then considers how this qualitative approach might be applied to one particular genre of legal text: namely, judicial opinions, otherwise known as reasons for judgment. In doing so, it argues that robust qualitative analyses of legal texts must consider the unique characteristics of those texts, such as their distinct form, voice, rhetorical structure, and performative capabilities.

The methodological framework outlined here should encourage qualitative researchers to approach legal texts more readily and challenge the hegemony of doctrinal approaches to legal interpretation in social science research.

This chapter explores expert witnessing in anthropology and the raison d’être of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal concept that accounts for the contribution of social sciences to the resolution of disputes and the protection of human rights. The first section of this chapter provides a short historical outline of the occurrence and reception of anthropological expertise as expert witnessing. The second section surveys the theoretical reflections on anthropologists’ engagement with law. The third section explores the potential for anthropological expertise as a broader socio-legal notion in the common law and civil law legal systems. The chapter concludes with the opportunity and raison d’être of cultural expertise grounded on a skeptical approach to culture. It suggests that expert witnessing has been viewed mainly from a technical perspective of applied social sciences, which was necessary to set the legal framework of cultural experts’ engagement with law, but had the consequence of entrenching the impossibility of a comprehensive study of anthropological expert witnessing. While this chapter adopts a skeptical approach to culture, it also argues the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach that leads to an integrated definition of cultural expertise.

This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to address sufficiently in the dimensions of power, meaning, and social relationships: bottom-up lawmaking; transnational legal processes; and global legal pluralism. The idea of bottom-up lawmaking, already discussed, has the strength of beginning from the everyday practices by which problems are solved that lead eventually to the creation of a body of law. However, the phrase bottom-up suggests that this is a grassroots movement, while it is typically cosmopolitan elites who generate the informal rules that become established over time. Explicit attention to the power relationships underlying this process would help to clarify what “bottom-up” means. As Judith Resnick points out, the terms “soft law” and “hard law” are themselves problematic, incorporating gender ideologies and suggesting that some international laws are enforced firmly, which is rarely the case in practice (personal communication).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ongoing “new extraction” on the African continent. Contrary to mainstream scholarship and policies that see in law an external variable to remedy the “resource curse,” this paper channels attention toward the role of law as an institution of extraction in the longue durée. Unpacking the close association of law with the conversion of economic surpluses and power into enduring social relationships can help trace the mechanisms by which the uneven and unequal connection between Africa and the world is being negotiated, justified and challenged over time.

To this end, this paper deploys an approach anchored in political sociology of law and focuses on the roles played specifically by lawyers to trace the “interconnectedness” between European colonialism on the continent and the consolidation of the contemporary international economic and legal political order. It illustrates this approach with the case study of the “Africa” Bar in Paris as a key site in which extractive deals between multinational corporations and Francophone African states are negotiated.

This micro focus helps to explain the dual position of the “Africa” Bar in Paris, as offshore yet connected as it is shaped by both imperial legacies and ongoing waves of globalization into the African continent.

This approach traces a more nuanced explanation of Africa’s unequal and uneven relationship with the global economy as one shaped by the path of imperial legacies and successive and interconnected waves of globalization across Africa.

In recent years, traditional legal systems have been increasingly challenged by the rapid and wide-ranging changes induced by modern technology and science which constantly transform our economies and societies. The rise of a new type of scholarship in contemporary legal thought can be understood in the light of the growing disjunction between the traditional methods of law dealing with social problems and the overall pragmatic spirit of the globalized economies. The intrinsic conservatism of traditional law is sometimes (more or less explicitly) accused of being inadequate to cope with the problems raised by the application of new technologies and sciences, or worse, of being an impediment to the development of the full potential of the modern economies.

As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale.

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the supervening loss of inter-organisational trust in long-term commercial contracts. The underlying research question is whether contract law – the legal institution regulating economic exchanges – should intervene and enable a party to a long-term commercial contract to extricate itself from a situation where a relationship of trust has broken down irretrievably.

This paper uses doctrinal methodology and theoretical conceptualisation to answer the underlying research question. The legal instrument chosen for analysis purposes is the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. This paper also draws on extant literature on inter-organisational trust (including conceptual and empirical studies) to support the arguments and propositions. Furthermore, this study proceeds to assess the substantive justifiability of the proposed remedial measure using four normative values: legal certainty and predictability, protection of the performance interest, economic efficiency and the preservation of the relation.

The central argument put forward in this paper is the reformulation of draft Article 6.3.1 proposed by the UNIDROIT Working Group on Long-Term Contracts, which confers a novel right to terminate for a compelling reason. This paper presents a multidimensional model of inter-organisational trust that would serve as the conceptual framework for the proposed reformulation of the provision and establishes a coherent juridical basis for the legal solution that would accord with the Principles of International Commercial Contracts’ general remedial scheme. As for the normative assessment, this paper demonstrates that the proposed remedial measure would significantly promote efficient outcomes and positively serve the norms of legal certainty, protection of the performance interest and the preservation of the relation.

This paper addresses the lacuna in current legal scholarship in relation to the adverse socio-economic effects following trust violation and deterioration in inter-organisational relationships. Additionally, the propositions and findings should contribute to the workings of the UNIDROIT in adopting new rules and principles that would serve the special requirements of cross-border trade.