Boulanger, C., Creutzfeldt, N. and Hendry, J.
Socio-legal trajectories across Europe: comparative perspectives was published by Hart Publishing (Oñati international series in law and society) in 2025.
How do personal biographies and the history of the field intersect in socio-legal studies? The edited volume “Socio-legal trajectories across Europe: comparative perspectives” examines this question from the perspective of socio-legal researchers from various European countries (including Latin America and Israel). The book stems from a 2023 workshop at Spain’s International Institute for the Sociology of Law, where we invited European socio-legal scholars to engage in self-reflection on their research questions, methodologies, and theories within their specific legal and academic contexts, including historical trajectories. Contributors explored the interplay between their individual academic biographies and the intellectual, institutional, and political milieus shaping their work. The volume situates itself at the confluence of biographical and socio-historical narratives. Socio-legal studies have grown unevenly across national academic contexts, shaped by historically contingent institutional structures, disciplinary traditions, language barriers, and political conditions. While accounts of these developments usually aim for objectivity, they inevitably are subjective in the choice of themes or authors, or the conclusions they draw. The volume contends that incorporating author positionality transparently enriches comparative understanding.
The chapters in the book show a broad variety of socio-legal traditions and individual biographies, with chapters on Poland (Marta Bucholc), Hungary (Balász Fekete), the Western Balkans (Samir Foric), the Scandinavian countries (Ole Hammerlev), France (Liora Israël), Germany (Eva Kocher), and the UK (Sally Wheeler). In addition, Revital Madar’s chapter describes her reluctance to accept a socio-legal identification that she encountered during her academic journey in Europe, and Francisca Pou Gimenez shares her experiences in becoming a socio-legal constitutional scholar between Europe and the Americas.
In order to make sense of this diversity, and interconnectedness of life stories and individual developments, we propose four heuristic clusters for the analysis: (1) individual biography, emphasizing agency, chance, and positionality—including social identity factors like gender and ethnicity; (2) epistemic communities, understood as networks of scholars sharing epistemologies and shaping collective academic identities, where language and institutional structures mediate inclusion and influence; (3) institutional and political-economic factors that govern academic careers, such as funding regimes, evaluation mechanisms, and employment conditions; and (4) broader historical and cultural contexts that encompass political regimes, legacies of colonialism, and socio-historical path dependencies shaping the production of socio-legal knowledge.
These clusters interrelate but offer distinct analytical lenses. For example, epistemic communities reinforce identity and habitus—patterns of dispositions and behaviours shaped through socialization in academic networks—yet are subject to material constraints and historical contingencies. The volume’s case studies illustrate how national and regional differences persist despite increased English-language internationalization, with some contexts fostering strong socio-legal identities and institutions, and others marked by fragmentation.
As we say at the end of our introduction, we hope that this collection is the first of many, and we invite readers to ponder how they might develop their own comparative inquiry into different socio-legal trajectories around the world. Future studies could extend the perspective to a wider set of cases, test our assumptions and extrapolate yet more stories at the intersection of disciplinary histories and scholarly biographies. In particular, we think that more research is needed concerning the role of epistemic communities, which can be crucial to the growth of socio-legal studies. The impact of language needs to receive more attention, as transition to a global English-language epistemic community risks severing ties to local theory production. Gender was a recurrent theme in the contributions, which suggests that its influence across generations, across institutions, and across legal cultures remains a fruitful and important research topic. Finally, one distinctive feature of socio-legal studies is that one could argue that it first and foremost derives its identity from its opposition to doctrinal scholarship. This is true to different degrees and in different ways across countries. These varieties remind us to also pay attention to the histories of legal scholarship, which often influences the thinking of socio-legal scholars more than they are aware.