Title: Locating the Context in Law-in-Context

Abstract: Law in Context has become one of the more prominent approaches within legal scholarship over the last six decades. What emerged as a challenge to traditional legal teaching and research within British academia (which had focused almost exclusively on law-as-text and law-in-practice), has had a significant impact on expanding the horizons of legal scholarship by situating law within its wider socio-political, cultural, historical and economic setting.

There has been a range of areas that have moved further under this banner, ranging from international law to welfare law, from constitutional law to family law, from company law to human rights, among others. But what does it mean to say that law should be rooted in its context? Is it sufficient to demand that law should be analysed within its larger social, political, economic, cultural or even local/global settings? Does this mean that a contextual approach to law is similar in all but name to social and sociological analyses of normative orderings?

Generally, the scholarship of law in context takes ‘context’ as the external environment of law – both within which law operates, as well as that which is reflected in the text of the law – including the drivers behind law-making within legislatures and courts. This paper suggests that the demands imposed by context go beyond this, and argues that there are four key avenues that a contextual approach to law opens up and which distinguish it as an analytical approach. These are a focus on the contingency of law, the (paradoxical) re-centring of law as an analytical category, the call for positioning of the scholar and researcher and, finally, the approach’s engagement with the legal-constitutional experiences of the global south.