Laypeople in Law Socio-Legal Perspectives on Non-Professionals

This book contributes to a better understanding of the role laypeople hold in the social functioning of law.

It adopts the scholarly insight that the law is unthinkable without an everyday legal understanding of the law pursued by laypeople. It engages with the assumption that not only the law?s existence but also its development is shaped by the layperson?s affirmations, oppositions, ignorance, or negations of the law. This volume thus aims to fill a void in socio-legal studies. Whereas many sociolegal theories tend to conceptualize the law through legal experts? actions, institutions, procedures, and codifications, it argues that such a viewpoint underestimates the role of laypeople in the law?s processing and advocates for a strengthened conceptual place in socio-legal theory.

This book will appeal to socio-legal scholars and sociologists (of law), as well as to legal practitioners and laypersons themselves.

1. Laypeople in Law: Moving from a Blind Spot in Socio-Legal Studies Towards a Comprehensive Field of Research

Part I. Distinctions: On Blurring Boundaries Between Laypeople and Legal Experts

2. Ebb and Flow: Framing and Sidestepping in Relationships Between Laypeople and Legal Intermediaries

3. Laypeople’s Attitudes Towards and Experiences With the Law

Part II. Contributions: On Laypeople in Law-Making, Norm Interpretation, and Judicial Formalisation

4. Creating Social Existence Through Law: Laypeople’s Successful Struggle for a Certificate of Miscarriage

5. Ecocide and the Co-Production of International Environmental Norms Through Laypeople

Part III. Appropriations: On the Mimesis of Judicial Forms

6. Mobilising International Law, Subverting the Judicial Form: The 1967 Russell Tribunal as an Experiment in Utopian Justice

7. Russell Tribunal II on Repression in Brazil, Chile, and Latin America (1974–1976): The Success and Limits of Transnational Legal Mobilisation

Part IV. Structurations: On Law as a Shaping Force

8. Legal Consciousness Without Legal Culture?: A Comment on Ewick and Silbey’s The Common Place of Law

9. Laypersons’ Judgments on Fictive Cases: Public Perceptions of Gender-Based Violence in France and Germany

10. Beyond the Law?: Laypeople in Law, Civil Disobedience, and Conceptions of Violence

Andrea Kretschmann is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Dean at the School of Culture & Society at Leuphana University, Germany. She is also Associate Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, Germany.

Guillaume Mouralis is Research Professor (directeur de recherche) in History and Sociology at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France. He is member of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is also Associate Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, Germany.

Ulrike Zeigermann is Assistant Professor of Social Science Sustainability Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She is also Associate Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, Germany.