On Historical Contextualisation: Some Critical Socio-Legal Reflections

This article examines the relationship of historico-legal studies to the wider context of socio-legal studies. It issues a challenge to rethink the nature and role of legal history in the light of socio-legal theory and the extent to which it out to be used by legal scholars. The discussion explores the benefits to socio-legal studies of interdisciplinarity. It suggests that historical reconstructions that contextualise the law should be properly acknowledged as a subgenre at least of the socio-legal movement, not simply perceived as an add-on methodology.