Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Tomlins on Legal History at La Trobe in the Age of CLS

Christopher L. Tomlins, University of California, Irvine School of Law, has posted Law ‘And’, Law ‘In’, Law ‘As’: The Definition, Rejection and Recuperation of the Socio-Legal Enterprise, which appears in Law In Context 29 (2013): 137-163.  Here is the abstract:
The critical moment in socio-legal studies that flowered in the United States and elsewhere between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s coincided with the maturation of the Legal Studies Department at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. During its two-decade span (1972-1994) La Trobe Legal Studies developed multidisciplinary critical and theoretical perspectives on law – as substance, as professional practice, as field of academic inquiry – to an extent and depth unrivalled in Australia or, with just a few exceptions, internationally. This essay charts the particular trajectory followed by one of those perspectives, legal history, both at La Trobe and in the wider world. Simultaneously, it offers a short history of the Department itself: of its growth during the 1970s and 1980s; of its transformation into a law school during the 1990s; and of the struggles to maintain a place for the social in the legal that occurred during that transformation.