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In June 2025, MEAP Program Manager, Elizabeth Lhost, participated in an online forum celebrating the 20th anniversary issue of the journal Socio-Legal Review: SLR@20: Reflections from India, South Asia, and Beyond. Started in 2005 by a group of students at the National Law School of Indian Bengaluru, Socio-Legal Review (or, SLR) is an open access, student-run law journal that publishes peer reviewed scholarship on a range of law and society subjects. The special anniversary issue features articles from historians, anthropologists, lawyers, and law scholars across the globe.
A recording of the launch event is available through the SLR’s YouTube channel.
Fingerprints And Fragments: Reflections on the Challenges and Contributions of Socio-Legal History
Lhost’s contribution to the issue, “Fingerprints and Fragments: Reflections on the Challenges and Contributions of Socio-legal History,” focuses on questions of archives, methods, and the ongoing challenges of accessing and using legal sources to write critical legal histories.
Article Abstract
To narrate law’s past, legal history depends on archives. Yet law’s archive, developed to serve law, necessarily dictates history’s terms. Critical legal history challenges this relationship. Inspired by trends in subaltern and postcolonial studies, critical legal historians push back against the dominance of doctrine. They bring the complexities of context and the vagaries of society, economy, and politics to bear on law’s story, framing law as part of, not separate from, history. To do this, critical legal historians challenge law’s archive. They interrogate what is said and what remains unsaid in the written record. They articulate the role that bureaucracy and record- keeping play in upholding and maintaining law’s power. And they read legal sources in new ways to place doctrine in line with practice and to situate law within society. Scaling up from fingerprints and archival fragments to the study of legal history as a field, this article outlines how trends in socio-legal studies have contributed to the study of law’s past and articulates the challenges that remain.