Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. The vast field of socio-legal studies provides multiple lenses through which law can be considered. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, thi…
In this chapter, I explore the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, in order to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the interface between law and medicine. This chapter makes two key points: first, it argues that both biomedicine and law have relied on a particular sense of ‘modernity’ as a linear temporal process; in turn, this has been key in d…
This chapter reflects on what materiality-inflected methodologies1 can bring to an anthropology of law, and to legal studies more generally. Its starting point is an increasing attention across the social sciences and humanities for objects, and thinking beyond the human. These have often, but not only, emerged from science and technology studies (STS), to which we pay particular attention. How…