Approaching the Econo-Socio-Legal

Abstract

Economic life revolves around goods and services. Legal life revolves around rules. Economic and legal life become entangled where the creation, destruction, use, abuse or avoidance of rules affects, and/or is affected by, the production, distribution and/or exchange of goods and services. Economic and legal life are both part of social life, in the sense that they are created and performed by interacting human beings. This point may seem obvious, even simplistic. But it has complex and interdisciplinary ramifications. Perhaps as a result, it has been lost, even sometimes denied, by many lawyers, sociologists and economists. This article offers a systematic introduction to a body of historical and contemporary research that is distinctive in its commitment to the observations that ‘the economy’ and ‘the law’ are mutually constitutive; and that both are in turn mutually constitutive of wider social life, including that part of social life relating to how we think and communicate about the econo-socio-legal. The aim is to offer a framework for approaching econo-socio-legal thinking and practice from the past, present and future.