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Panel 3: Can We Translate Law and Society?: Toward a New Legal Realist Framework
Chair:
Participants:
Robert Burns (Northwestern University)
Mary Anne Case (University of Chicago)
William K. Ford (John Marshall Law School)
Katie Gruber (University of Chicago)
Winnifred Sullivan (SUNY, Buffalo)
This panel presents a collaborative approach developed by an ongoing working group in Chicago, which brings together researchers who work on law and language. The group has specifically focused on how social phenomena are transformed when translated in and through the language of law.
The panelists in this group are part of a working group on New Legal Realist Approaches to Translation that has been meeting together for three years. The papers in this session present an interdisciplinary synthesis that has emerged from these meetings, providing a framework for studying the process by which law and social science translate each other, as well as the social world around them. They start by examining the status of a piece of knowledge in one field as opposed to another. Different disciplines pose different kinds of questions, and create different kinds of relationships with “facts. These papers analyze how a different relationship with “same” chunks of information is created depending on the mode of translation that is used, focusing on social policy, social science, law practice, and academic law.