The study of culture, law, and crisis

This paper reviews cultural sociological approaches to the study of law and how they may be applied to future research on law-related social crises. As the world faces myriad social crises, such as rising authoritarianism and police violence, the study of culture and the law has become an even more urgent intellectual and practical endeavor. Over the last decade, five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. While past research has provided generative insight, future research would benefit from more precise considerations of rules and norms in this unsettled moment. Moreover, future research could leverage the five cultural concepts to sharpen understandings of inequality and social control in understudied legal organizations, along understudied axes of social stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies into the legal system.