Institute for Law and Society

The Institute for Law and Society (ILS) at New York University (NYU) was established in 1993. It is a center for faculty, graduate students, law students, and undergraduates to study law and legal institutions from a transdisciplinary standpoint. Its intellectual focus departs from the traditional approach to legal education in the United States, largely consisting of training in legal analysis and argument, and centers its scholarly and curricular attention on the study of [Page 783]fundamental issues and problems in the relationship between law and society.

The ILS examines questions from the past forty years of U.S. sociolegal scholarship as well as those presented in the classical works of European scholars in this field, which are especially important in the present period of accelerated social, political, and economic change. With the formation of new economic communities, global social movements, and postcolonial societies in Europe and the global South, new relationships between and social structures and law cannot be analyzed by lawyers alone or by political scientists, economists, sociologists, or anthropologists. The same holds true for issues resulting from the dissolution of traditional political alliances and even nations, such as those in Eastern Europe.

Students require training in a more comprehensive, transdisciplinary curriculum designed to study law in light of changing cultural, economic, and political forces. Law is transforming as it increasingly draws on other disciplines for its knowledge of social relations and for solutions to social problems. Thus, housed in the Law School, the Institute's Law and Society Program (LSP, established in 1996) locates disciplinary studies of law, such as law and politics, legal anthropology, economic analysis of law, sociology of law, criminology, law and psychology, and legal history in a coherent academic program at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

At the graduate level, the Institute offers a doctorate and joint degrees in law and society. The joint programs address a growing trend in U.S. law schools to hire faculty who have both JD and PhD degrees. The LSP trains students who plan careers in academic disciplines, such as those in social science departments, undergraduate legal studies programs, and law schools, as well as applied policy research.

The LSP was modeled after the first U.S. graduates of this kind created the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (1978) at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1997, along with the Justice Studies Program at Arizona State University, Berkeley and NYU formed the Consortium on Graduate Law and Society Programs (CGLSP). This is an organization of universities that grant law and society degrees or have programs and centers that provide systematic and sustained financial support for students who are working on degrees in traditional disciplines but focused on law and society. The CGLSP's premise is that law is a distinct form of social ordering, neither reducible to, nor fully contained within, any other scholarly field or discipline.

NYU's Institute combines the strengths of its Law School and the expertise of its law and society scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Science to form a core faculty of twenty-two and an affiliated faculty of thirteen members. The Law School's investment in the areas of global and human rights, its historic contribution to national civil liberties and civil rights debates, and its leading role in advancing clinical law advocacy, public interest law, criminal justice, and legal history have also shaped the pedagogy and curricular content of the LSP. LSP scholars offer courses and research projects addressing various empirical and theoretical problems: the politics of dispute processing and litigation, criminal courts, and civil justice reforms; advances in sociolegal theory concerning new forms of punishment, bureaucratic and popular justice, gendering processes in the law, and globalization of law; and others.

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