The field of socio-legal research has encountered three fundamental challenges over the last
three decades - it has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to legal doctrine for
failing to develop a sound theoretical foundation and for not keeping pace with the effects of
the increasing globalization and internationalization of law state and society. This book
examines these three challenges from a methodological standpoint. It addresses the first two by
demonstrating that legal sociology has much to say about justice as a kind of social experience
and has always engaged theoretically with forms of normativity albeit on its own empirical
terms rather than on legal theory's analytical terms. The book then explores the third
challenge a result of the changing nature of society by highlighting the move from the
industrial relations of early modernity to the post-industrial conditions of late modernity an
age dominated by information technology. It poses the question whether socio-legal research has
sufficiently reassessed its own theoretical premises regarding the relationship between law
state and society so as to grasp the new social and cultural forms of organization specific to
the twenty-first century's global societies.
