August issue of OSLS is available: Sociology of law and prison studies: The social uses of law within the prison’s legal field

The July-August issue of Oñati Socio-legal Series is available online. Titled "Sociology of law and prison studies: The social uses of law within the prison’s legal field", the issue, edited by Luca Sterchele (Università degli Studi di Torino) and Francesca Vianello (Università di Padova), presents original pieces of research by socio-legal scholars that gathered in a workshop at the IISL.

The editors write that "this special issue aims to contribute to the understanding of the space of law within the prison context—that is, the forms of its actual and instrumental use, as well as the practices through which it is neutralized. In this sense, it responds to the proposal put forward by Salle and Chantraine (2009) to react against juridicism (Bourdieu 1987), that is, the “tendency (...) to describe the social world in the language of rules” (Bourdieu 1987, 40), by advocating for “an empirical sociology of the social uses of law in prison.”

The issue is completed by assorted pieces of socio-legal research on a variety of topics.