Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorDuncanson, Ian
dc.contributor.editorKerry Petersen
dc.date.accessioned2019-03-22T04:45:21Z
dc.date.available2019-03-22T04:45:21Z
dc.date.issued2013
dc.identifier.issn08115796
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10072/165353
dc.description.abstractThis article draws attention to the historical dimension of what we now term socio-legal studies because it has been neglected and because it allows us to recognise socio-legal studies' distinctive and multidisciplinary character. It is not the sociology or history of law, since both rely on an a priori assumption about the nature and existence of something called law, its teleology, or evolution, or its policy use and implications. This assumption most clearly emerges from Bentham's view that law is the sign of sovereign will, a doctrine enthusiastically adopted by East India Company servants in late 18th and early 19th century India and popularised for 19th and 20th century students of law by John Austin. It owes something, too, to the Hegelian separation of civil and political society, but the article does not have space to address this. England emerged from its 17th century struggles with a very different practical and theoretical trajectory from the Westphalian ideas of discrete sovereignties. In the writings of Locke and Shaftesbury and of the Scottish Enlightenment down to Adam Smith, the sovereign origins of law varied from the dangerous to the secondary. Politics, religion and law for them required a stable civil society so the primary questions were the social nature of human subjectivity and how this could be cultivated to accomplish harmony, the agreeable forms of disagreement they considered necessary for inquiry and progress. After the American war of 1776, imperial and domestic governments became more authoritarian, more under the control of figures like Matthew Arnold's philistine middle class of my title, 'Businessman Bottles', focused on short-term commercial gain and suspicious of theoretical endeavour. Cultural understandings of law were increasingly mediated by the technicians of law, at the Bar and elsewhere. Legal Studies at La Trobe, however brief its career and however uncertain but hopeful about its future we may be, as well as the opposition to its existence, can usefully be seen in this longer context.
dc.description.peerreviewedYes
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherThe Federation Press
dc.publisher.placeAustralia
dc.publisher.urihttps://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=655417320022061;res=IELHSS
dc.relation.ispartofpagefrom59
dc.relation.ispartofpageto73
dc.relation.ispartofissue2
dc.relation.ispartofjournalLaw in Context
dc.relation.ispartofvolume29
dc.subject.fieldofresearchLaw and Society
dc.subject.fieldofresearchLaw
dc.subject.fieldofresearchcode180119
dc.subject.fieldofresearchcode1801
dc.titleSocio-legal Studies in the Ages of Empire and Businessman Bottles: An Historical and Political Account
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.descriptionC1 - Articles
dc.type.codeC - Journal Articles
dc.description.versionVersion of Record (VoR)
gro.facultyArts, Education & Law Group, School of Law
gro.rights.copyright© 2013 Federation Press. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.
gro.hasfulltextFull Text
gro.griffith.authorDuncanson, Ian W.


Files in this item

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

  • Journal articles
    Contains articles published by Griffith authors in scholarly journals.

Show simple item record