Cultural Legal Studies: Methodologies of Reflexive Attunement

This chapter introduces cultural legal studies as the study of law as a cultural artefact. We argue that encounters with law are the primary sites where legal meaning is produced, and thus where it can be interrogated through a range of appropriate methods. For cultural legal studies, these encounters are variable, taking place in different contexts with different participants and forms and requiring techniques of analysis that are methodologically appropriate to that encounter. It is because of the plurality and variability of law’s cultural forms, each demanding particular methodological choices, that cultural legal studies can be understood as a process of reflexive attunement. The chapter traces the emergence of cultural legal studies from scholarship in law and the humanities more broadly, distinguishing it from both cultural studies and the cultural study of law, as well as from related ‘law and’ disciplines (law and literature, law and film, law and popular culture) by its insistence on the co-constitution of ‘law’ and ‘culture’. We argue that cultural legal studies is characterised by understanding both the way in which law is produced and encountered in and through cultural artefacts and the need to engage the appropriate methodologies for analysing the particular cultural form being encountered.