Handmaidens, partners or go-betweens: Reflections on the push and pull of the judicial and justice policy audience

Résumé

Debate about the ways in  empirical accounts of socio-legal phenomena may be compromised by close engagement with policy audiences has long dogged discussions of the possibility of progressive agendas in the field. This paper re-examines these critiques by reference to a case study in which the authors worked closely with UK judges and the court service. It argues that accounts of the relationship between the policy audience and researchers frequently rely on overly simplistic conceptualisations of elite state actors and the ways in which empirical researchers engage with the powerful. We suggest that a range of forms of interaction are possible in which researchers can be characterised as  handmaidens, partners or go-betweens. While acknowledging the importance of interrogating how the policy audience can compromise the independence of academic researchers, we argue that debate has tended to rest on oversimplified understandings of the dynamics of interactions with powerful state actors.