Law Observed: Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law

SW 42– Law Observed: Sociological Methods and Empirical Research on Law

Convenors: Marco Mazzocca; Miriam Ferraro

Contact: miriam.ferraro@unife.it 

Modern legal systems operate within increasingly complex social environments. Issues such as social inequality, migration, global crises, and the growing role of digital technologies challenge traditional understandings of how law functions and how legal authority is produced and exercised. Law does not operate solely through abstract norms or formal institutions, but through a wide range of practices, actors, and sites in which meanings, power relations, professional roles, and interpretative frameworks are continuously negotiated.

While legal philosophy has long engaged with these questions through normative and conceptual analysis, such approaches often leave underexplored the empirical conditions under which law is interpreted, enacted, contested, and experienced. Sociological and empirical research on law offers crucial tools for examining the legal field as a socially embedded domain, shaped by institutional routines, professional cultures, political dynamics, and everyday practices.

This Special Workshop focuses on sociological and empirical approaches to the study of law, broadly understood. Rather than concentrating on a single institutional setting, the workshop invites contributions that examine how law operates across different contexts, including but not limited to judicial institutions, administrative bodies, legislative processes, professional communities, and interactions between legal actors and citizens. By drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods—such as ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis, case studies, surveys, and statistical analyses—participants are encouraged to observe law “in action” and to analyse how legal categories, norms, responsibilities, and decisions are socially produced and negotiated.

Empirical inquiry into the legal field sheds light on the relationship between formal legal frameworks and everyday practices, revealing the social, political, and organizational dimensions of legal governance. In this sense, the workshop aims to foster dialogue between legal philosophy, socio-legal studies, and empirically oriented research, showing how the observation of legal practices can inform and enrich theoretical and normative debates.

We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Sociological and empirical methods in legal research: epistemological and methodological reflections on studying law as a social phenomenon, including debates on objectivity, reflexivity, positionality, and the social construction of legal knowledge; challenges related to access, power asymmetries, and research ethics; and the implications of empirical findings for legal theory and philosophy.
• The legal field and its actors: sociological analyses of legal professions, institutions, and organizations, as well as the interactions between legal experts, policymakers, administrative actors, and laypersons. This includes studies on professional socialization, expertise, authority, and the production and circulation of legal knowledge.
• Legal practices and decision-making processes: empirical investigations into how legal norms are interpreted, applied, negotiated, or resisted in different contexts, including institutional settings, policymaking processes, and everyday interactions with law.
• Law, inequality, and social change: research on how law intersects with social inequalities, migration, citizenship, and access to justice, including the role of legal consciousness, mobilization of law, and the differential effects of legal regimes on various social groups.
• Biolaw and sociology of health: examining the intersection of law, medicine, and healthcare through sociological lenses. This includes studying the social construction of medical knowledge and expertise in legal contexts, the regulation of healthcare practices and medical technologies, reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, end-of-life decision-making, organ donation and transplantation, genetic testing and privacy, biobanking and research ethics, disability rights, and the role of healthcare institutions in mediating legal and ethical dilemmas. Contributions may address how legal frameworks shape experiences of illness and care, the politics of medical authority, and the medicalization of social problems.
• Technology, digitalization, and legal practice: sociological perspectives on digitalization, datafication, and technological mediation in legal practices, including the impact of algorithms, AI, and digital infrastructures on legal decision-making, accountability, and professional roles.

By bringing together scholars working at the intersection of sociology, law, and philosophy, this workshop aims to explore how empirical research contributes to a richer understanding of law as a dynamic social field and as a set of practices embedded in broader institutional and cultural contexts.

Participation and publication:

This workshop invites scholars and researchers from legal philosophy, socio-legal studies, and empirical legal research. To participate, please send an email to miriam.ferraro@unife.it with the title and abstract (300–400 words) of your paper, your affiliation, and a short bio by May 30, 2026.

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a collective volume or in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Updated information and workshop news will be provided via https://coin-project.org