Focus and Scope

Scope and Topics

SPL welcomes original empirical research articles, critical theoretical treatises, socio-legal case analyses, and systematic reviews. Key areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

• Critical Legal Studies & Power Dynamics: Hegemony and the law, state-sanctioned violence, structural violence, legal instrumentalism, and elite control of legal frameworks.

• Political Economy & Legal Systems: Law and capitalism, corporate accountability, regulatory capture, labor exploitation, property rights, and the legal reproduction of economic inequality.

• Law, Social Movements & Resistance: Civil disobedience, activist lawyering, legal mobilization by grassroots movements, indigenous sovereignty, and subaltern legal struggles.

• Sociology of Legal Institutions: Power relations within judicial hierarchies, police discretion, penal systems, carceral sociology, and surveillance governance.

• Postcolonial, Decolonial & Intersectional Jurisprudence: Decolonizing legal theory, intersectionality in legal outcomes, racial justice, and customary vs. modern state legal authority.