Open research questions in Law in Society and Culture
39 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 4,647 Law in Society and Culture papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95381-6 Van Eemeren, F. H., & Garssen, B. (2023). The Pragma-Dialectical Approach to the Fallacies Revisited. Argumentation, 37(2), 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-023-09605-w Van Eemeren, F. H., Garssen, B., Krabbe, E. C. W., Henkemans, A. F. S., Verheij, B., & Wagemans, J. H. M. (2014). The Pragma-Dialectical Theory of Argumentation. In F. H. Van Eemeren, B. Garssen, E. C. W. Krabbe, A. F. Snoeck Henkemans, B. Verheij, & J. H. M. Wagemans, Handbook of Argumentation Theory (pp. 517–613). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9473-5_10 Van Eemeren, F. H., Garssen, B., Krabbe, E. C. W., Snoeck Henkemans, A. F., Verheij, B., & Wagemans, J. H. M. (2014a). Argumentation Theory. In F. H. Van Eemeren, B. Garssen, E. C. W. Krabbe, A. F. Snoeck Henkemans, B. Verheij, & J. H. M. Wagemans, Handbook of Argumentation Theory (pp. 1–49). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9473-5_1 Van Eemeren, F. H., Garssen, B., Krabbe, E. C. W., Snoeck Henkemans, A. F., Verheij, B., & Wagemans, J. H. M. (2014b). Handbook of Argumentation Theory. Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-90-481-9473-5 Walton, D. (1992). Slippery Slope Arguments. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198239253.001.0001 Walton, D. (2015). The Basic Slippery Slope Argument. Informal Logic, 35(3), 273.
Moreover, future research could leverage each concept to sharpen understandings of social control, inequality, and regulatory compliance in understudied contexts, along understudied axes of stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the law.
Yet, comparative studies investigating how judges from diverse legal traditions rhetorically calibrate their “positioning” (individual stance) and “proximity” (heteroglossic engagement with majority and dissenting voices) remain scarce (Hyland, 2015).
How judges dissent: A comparative rhetorical and metadiscursive analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and U.S. Supreme Court separate opinions · 2025 · DOIFocussing on the daily work of defence lawyers not only helps further studies of legal professionals on the African continent, but it also contributes to recent debates on authoritarian legality by detailing the adaptation strategies of legal professionals as they operate within a politicised legal system.
Further, I argue that the vast amounts of contradictory evidence typically tendered in rights challenges, as well as the complex and controversial nature of Charter questions and the inevitable need for judges to adjudicate values, risk resulting in undue deference to the legislator, hinder the delivery of justice and ultimately undermine the raison-d’être of Charter litigation.
To the extent that the tangents and subplots cannot be completely incorporated into the resulting synthesis (an open question, in my view), the persistence of theoretical loose ends will arise not from any failure on the author's part, since the rigor demonstrated in this work is second to none, but rather from the brute historical fact that we do not live in 1811 but in 2011.
Despite being compromised by an uncertain anchorage in metaphysics and a morass of epistemological aporia, the elaboration of the doctrine of CRT should be seen as an inevitable commentary on the various different, open and conflicting results of the (constituent) interface between notions of justice, ascribing identity and formulae of citizenship.
L'identitŕ del diritto: la critical race theory e la costituzione normativa del soggetto · 2010 · DOIBut even here, Glazer attempts to make a case of private discrimination by focusing on the actions of just two private entities - the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Google - where her proof of discrimination involves highly anecdotal or limited information, which fails to establish anything definitive.
IF OBSCENITY WERE TO DISCRIMINATE[dagger] · 2009The major limitations of this conception are that it (1) introduces cultural bias into research by defining away the disruptive and exploitive aspects of law, (2) tends to equate legal with consensual methods or processes of conflict management, which are presumed to be more effective than coercive ones, and (3) encourages research in which natural law and/or functional-systems assumptions are taken for granted.
)’ It, too, might be called a “discipline of citizen- ship” in a democratic society,” but COW- ley pleads more strongly against the elec- tive system, and thinks that “social and civic devotion to the ongoing of demo- cratic America” can only be gained if the freedom in course selection is limited, and limited by a “discipline which gives first place to educntion for enlightened citizenship.
Modern critiques of judicial empathy liberate themselves from an important limitation imposed by those prior theories—they believe that their proposed methods can be applicable beyond the realm of private law, and into public law—but if this is impossible, then these theories have…
Research into children’s participation in safeguarding processes consistently demonstrates that children do not disclose in response to open questions alone.
Judicial discourse has attracted its fair share of academic attention from a variety of perspectives, and yet, one of its most characteristic realizations remains somewhat understudied.
Abstract Narrative navigation and lawyers’ use of linguistic persuasion in affidavits and skeleton arguments for appellant relief in criminal cases remains one of the under-researched areas in the field of language and law.
Narrative navigation in legal persuasion: a rhetorical analysis of lawyers’ affidavits and skeleton arguments for appellate relief in criminal cases in Malawi · 2025 · DOIWhile such interventions pose great challenges to the participants’ interpersonal relationships and lead to a great deal of face-loss and humiliation for the object of intervention, their practice is warranted by interveners to tackle a moral issue.
On the moral grounds of professional argumentative talk: English-mediated talk in Iranian PhD dissertation defences · 2022 · DOIAlthough the subject of divorce and the development of divorce legislation in nineteenth-century England and Wales have received some academic attention, much work remains to be done.
Petitions to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Divorce, 1857–1923 · 2022 · DOIMany documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them.
The article concludes by pointing out some aspects of Leibniz's thought that are most valuable for the further study of law, space and spatial justice in contemporary scholarship.
In Canada, it remains to be seen whether the Iacobucci Report and Kokopenace decision mark a watershed moment that will lead to greater representation of Aboriginals on juries and a step toward healing the deep distrust that Aboriginals have for the criminal justice system.
A Tale of Two Countries' Engagement with the Fair Cross Section Right: Aboriginal Underrepresentation on Ontario Juries and the Boston Marathon Bomber's Jury Wheel Challenge · 2015Whereas state intrusion in the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms is limited to the protection of the freedom of others, liberalism expands the possible terrain of intervention by assigning institutional codings to its formative principles.
Review: <i>Law and the Stranger</i>, by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey · 2012 · DOIThis study concludes that reforms crafted to counter gender bias in the operation of homicide law have produced mixed results for female victims of intimate partner homicide and related case law.
Homicide Law Reform in Victoria, Australia: From Provocation to Defensive Homicide and Beyond · 2011 · DOIThis the dead don't hear approach gets - as said - contrasted with the wide-ranging protection for deceased persons in Germany, which is only limited by the passage of time.
Dignitarian Posthumous Personality Rights - An Analysis of U.S. and German Constitutional and Tort Law · 2008 · DOIIn this article, I first propose a methodology for the analysis of closing arguments in criminal trials, an understudied linguistic genre, that can be used to expose how lawyers take the same defendant, victim, and evidence and linguistically create opposing discursive representations of the case.
Manipulative silence and social representation in the closing arguments of a child sexual abuse case · 2008 · DOIOne of the most frequently mentioned, yet seriously understudied, changes brought to Canadian society by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is its influence on political debate and how citizens understand and treat rights.
2 Whether Schiltz's powerful, passionately argued advice turns out to generate a constructive conversation, and even whether it is a conversation at all and not a confusing series of accusations, defenses, and counter-charges, remains to be seen.
Thinking About the Business of Practicing Law · 1999
Most-cited papers in Law in Society and Culture
- The Folly of the 'Social Scientific' Concept of Legal Pluralism · Journal of Law and Society · 1993 · 163 citations
- Where the Action Is: Critical Legal Studies and Empiricism · Stanford Law Review · 1984 · 135 citations
- Moral Passage: The Symbolic Process in Public Designations of Deviance · Social Problems · 1967 · 125 citations
- Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital · Law & Society Review · 2020 · 59 citations
- Law as a Weapon in Social Conflict · Social Problems · 1976 · 56 citations
- Legal Language: Pragmatics, Poetics, and Social Power · Annual Review of Anthropology · 1994 · 52 citations
- Toward Reflexivity in the Anthropology of Expertise and Law · American Anthropologist · 2020 · 45 citations
- From Car Wash to Bolsonaro: Law and Lawyers in Brazil's Illiberal Turn (2014–2018) · Journal of Law and Society · 2020 · 41 citations
- Rivers of Law and Contested Terrain: A Law and Society Approach to Economic Rationality · Law & Society Review · 2004 · 39 citations
- CRIMINALIZED SUBJECTIVITY · Du Bois Review Social Science Research on Race · 2021 · 29 citations
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