New Perspectives on Empirical Methods and Critical Race Theory

Submission Deadline: May 15th, 2023

There have been long-standing tensions within socio-legal studies between social science methods that hold themselves out as being able to measure social phenomenon with some level of objectivity and various critical theoretical traditions that question the presumed neutrality of law and the scientific method. While these debates have raged for decades, there have been few attempts to build a positive account of the relationship between critical theory and social science

methods that might be able to leverage the strengths of each approach to provide new insights that could not be made alone. 

Over the past decade and a half, an approach that blends empirical methods and Critical Race Theory (eCRT) has emerged as an attempt to bring the frameworks of critical race theory in conversation with social science methods so as to create new forms of race scholarship that further elucidates these theoretical approaches in ways that are in conversation with methodological contributions from the social sciences. This Special Issue seeks to showcase new research emerging from eCRT as a new tradition of socio-legal scholarship and show how it may be uniquely able to address some of the most pressing problems facing law and society. This Special Issue seeks authors who can present empirical research and analyze it through critical theoretical frameworks that can further develop the evolving relationship between law and society research and CRT.

To be considered, submissions must explicitly engage with critical race theory, offer empirical analysis, and demonstrate a unique contribution to existing race and law & society literatures.

Possible topics include: 

1. Policing and surveillance; 

2. Immigration 

3. Work Law and labor law

4. Incarceration

5. Abolitionist Studies

6. Social and environmental determinants of health

Author Guidelines

Manuscripts submitted to the Law & Society Review must not be under consideration by another publication. All manuscripts should include the following content, easily identifiable as such by readers.

1.    A literature review section that situates the research question in a broader socio-legal literature.

2.    A data and methods section that describes the data used to answer the research question and how the data were analyzed.  

3.    A results section that presents and discusses all research findings.

Law & Society Review will consider submissions between 8,000 and 16,000 words in length, inclusive of tables, figures, references, notes, abstract and title. The editors reserve the right to reject without review manuscripts that are longer than 16,000 words or shorter than 8,000 words.

Submission Process for the Special Issue 

If you are interested in participating, please email an abstract and working title to lsr@lawandsociety.org and special editors Osagie Obasogie obasogie@berkeley.edu and Mario Barnes mbarnes@law.uci.edu by May 15th. We anticipate the special editors presenting the slate of articles selected for Law and Society Review by June 8, 2023. A full draft of the article will need to be submitted to Law and Society Review by November 1, 2023 so that it can go through the review process.