ABSTRACT
This chapter is about what it means to be a “socio-legal studies” academic, and its travails. We interrogate some of the inner challenges of socio-legal studies as a field, before turning to some of its persistent fragility within the broader legal academy. Our argument concerns the treatment of interdisciplinarity in a disciplinary environment, and the ways in which the disciplines, in their search for “reality” and “truth”, make us the subject of their gaze. For socio-legal academics, these boundary questions are an unspoken, inherent part of our identity, but, every now and again, they are opened out. This chapter discusses our “opening out”.
In the first section, we discuss some of the well-known issues with interdisciplinarity, with a particular focus on socio-legal studies. We argue that socio-legal studies has, in its label, produced its own problematic. It remains a challenge to doctrinal law (or that part of the wreckage of doctrinal law that clings to the assumption of its own autonomy), but also maintains its own assumptions of a pre-existing social strongly linked to the legal (as much grammatically, through a hyphen or conjoining the words); “studies” presupposes that these things are capable of being studied as a unique, seemingly homogeneous object.
In the second section of this chapter, we provide an empirical example of the fragility of socio-legal studies, its problematics and challenges. Our example relates to one of the anonymous reviews of a paper we submitted to a journal. The paper draws on our (separate) work to argue for the significance of non-human actors in socio-legal studies. Here, we focus on one of the reviews to provide an extended riff on the perils of interdisciplinarity and how interdisciplinary legal scholarship negotiates its legitimacy against doctrinal truths. Such are the academic problems caused by the anonymous peer review process that, on Twitter, #reviewer2 even has their own hashtag.
