Reza Banakar

Academic Background

I studied sociology of law at Lund University, where I also obtained my doctorate and taught various courses between September1988 and August 1997. In 1997, I moved to Oxford to take up the Paul Dodyk Research Fellowship at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, which was then at Wolfson College. In 2003, I joined the School of Law at the University of Westminster as a Reader in Law. Since 2007 I have been holding the Professorial Chair in Socio-Legal Studies. I currently teach comparative law and research methods within the LLM programme and legal philosophy within the LLB and supervise six PhD students. I also have various administrative duties including PhD admissions.

My research and publications are in the areas of law and social theory, socio-legal methodology, legal cultures, ethnic discrimination, public ombudsmen, law and literature, and rights. My latest book is an edited collection entitled Rights in Context: Law and Justice in Late Modern Society, was published by Ashgate in 2010. See: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1823403.

Current Research Projects:

1. Law, Justice and Community

This project concerns the role of law in late modern communities, which are characterised partly by the acceleration of globalisation and partly by the dismantling of the welfare state. The point of departure for this project is the London Riots in August 2011, which highlighted issues of social justice, culture of consumerism, political mobilisation and community. A pilot study is currently being carried out based on semi-structured interviews with various groups including those who participated in the riots, defence lawyers involved in riot cases, social workers and the police.

2. Law and Culture in Modern Iran

This study will described and analyse the Iranian legal culture and identity by focusing on the driving habits of Iranians. The driving habits and the attempts to regulate the Iranians’ traffic behaviour, will be used as a means of exploring how historical forces which have shaped the Iranian culture and identity throughout ages, continue to influence the interplay between the individual, society, law and the state in contemporary Iran. The driving habits have been chosen as the empirical focus of this study for two reasons: Firstly, they provide a point where attitudes to law, society, the state and modern technology coalesce and, secondly, because they represent one of the major social problems faced by the Iranian society.

A paper based on preliminary interviews conducted for this project is forthcoming in the British Journal of Middle Easter Studies (a copy of this paper is submitted. A draft copy is posted at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871029). This project has been awarded a research grant by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Further interviews and a conference are planned as part of this project.

Research in Sociology of Law

My research has had two primary objectives: first, to explore the internal/external dichotomy which pervades law and legal discourse and, second, to examine the consequences of globalisation for the organisation of law and legal regulation. The first concern cuts across all studies I have carried out and is part of the theoretical backdrop of my research into various substantive issues. The second concern has been developed in a more piecemeal fashion. My initial interest in globalisation was articulated in “Rättens utveckling i den globala byn” in the mid-1990s (published in 71 (1995) Retfærd) and further developed in “Reflexive Legitimacy in International Commercial Arbitration” (in Ashgate, 1998). Globalisation was the natural link between the issues of multiculturalism, which I had studied in my doctoral thesis, and what I considered to be a much more radical transformation of modern law and social organisation. In my more recent works, these issues have been brought together under the theoretical umbrella of “liquid society”.

The Dichotomy

My research explores how lawyers, judges, policymakers, legal scholars, social scientists and lay people perceive, describe and employ the law and how their perceptions and applications of the law interact with each other to create the law at any point in time and place. The studies I have carried out since the end of the 1980s show that legal forms of social organization arise out of the interaction between social practices which are seen and conceptualized partly as “internal” and partly as “external” to the legal system. This does not, however, mean that law consists of two from each other separate spheres of activity, which may be studied independently of each other. On the contrary, what happens “inside” the law and legal institutions is always linked to the events and actions taking place “outside” the law in the larger society and vice versa. How law creates its images of society and (re)constructs social relations internally is as much dependent on its internal mechanisms and communications (such as the interpretation and enforcement of legal rules and doctrine) as it is on external extra-legal factors (such as who makes a legal claim and how law is perceived and employed by various groups in society). In short:

“Since the inside and outside of law do not exist independently of each other and the boundary between them is re-negotiated from case to case, any absolute distinction between them amounts to introducing a false dichotomy. Law, whether defined as a sphere of social action, as a field of practice, as a form of discourse or as a system of rules, is continually in flux. That is why the inside and outside of law are used here not as absolute and immutable entities, but as variables indicating two relative forms of experience, i.e. experience-near and experience-distant manifestations and perceptions of the law, which an actor can develop in relation to law and legal processes. These experiences are shaped by the social context, which defines the inside and outside of law in relation to those people and circumstances that reproduce the law and its institutions at any given time and place. An individual (such as a policeman or an academic lawyer) or an organisation (such as the police or the law faculty) could be insider in one relationship and, at the same time, outsider in another relationship or social context. An arresting officer could be regarded as an insider to the law from the point of view of a detainee, but as an outsider from the point of view of the prosecutor, the defending attorney or the magistrate. A solicitor can be regarded as an insider when advising his or her clients, but as an outsider in the Inns of Court. A lower court judge is an insider when residing his/her court, but an outsider to the court of appeal”. (See “Studying Cases Empirically”, Oxford, Hart, 2005, at 154-5, an e-copy is available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1328257 ).

Thus, the focus of socio-legal research must be on the interaction between law and its social environment. More precisely, socio-legal research should examine the dialectical interaction between the internally and externally produced concepts, ideas, practices and images of law. To this end, I have tried to devise an empirically informed approach capable of describing and analyzing the complexity of the interaction between the social practices and processes which constitute law. (See Banakar, Reza (2003) Merging Law and Sociology: Beyond the Dichotomies of Socio-Legal Research (Berlin, Galda + Wilch). As part of this undertaking, I have interrogated the relationship between social scientific studies of law and traditional (doctrinal) legal research. (see “Law Through Sociology’s Looking Glass” An e-copy is available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1327025) and “Having Ones Cake and Eating It: The Paradox of Contextualisation in Socio-Legal Research” at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777165.