Socio-Legal Studies

Socio-legal scholarship draws on both theoretical and empirical perspectives to address the many relationships between law and society. While there is no single approach to doing socio-legal work, researchers typically view ‘law’ as existing through actors and practices and use various social science methods to study it. In this seminar, Dr Christian Boulanger offers a deep dive into socio-legal research by presenting the findings of a bi-national research project on ‘Socio-legal Trajectories in Germany and the UK’. The research aims to capture the history of socio-legal knowledge production in Germany and the UK using a range of data collection methods including surveys, interviews, text mining, bibliometric network analysis, and conventional hermeneutic techniques. This seminar will be invaluable to Max Planck Law researchers seeking to better understand how these specific methods can be applied to studying legal issues in broader social contexts, and to developing more critical approaches to the law.

Dr Christian Boulanger is a Research Fellow and Department coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory .