Annual Review of Law and Social Science - Volume 14, 2018

The sharing economy is an emergent field of scholarship. This review explores two clusters of debate regarding the sharing economy and seeks to discern the lines of a productive dialogue between them. It suggests that the current state of scholarship on law in the sharing economy is a complex and asymmetrical mix of narrative articulation and empirical exploration. The first cluster focuses on an on-demand commercial vision of the sharing economy and is generating an exploding legal literature largely not grounded on empirical research. This coexists with an emergent social science literature focused on a solidarity-inflected version of the sharing economy, which, however, pays little or no explicit attention to law or legality. Each cluster of debate is first separately explored, after which three sites of détente are identified where these trajectories edge toward each other: urban governance, sociolegal accounts of the interplay between enterprise diversity and regulation, and reconfigurations of property law. Common to all three is an appreciation of collective economic agency as of equal importance to regulatory responses.

Our social norms and moral values shape our beliefs about the propriety of different types of market exchanges. This review considers social and moral influences on beliefs about property and the consequences of these beliefs for the legal regulation of property. The focus is mainly on empirical evidence from social psychology, with additions from related areas like cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and other social sciences. After briefly reviewing empirical findings on perceptions of property at the level of the individual person, I examine how social relationships shape perceptions about ownership and exchange of property, as well as the boundaries of the broad category of property. Finally, I explore one important type of socially embedded property—the home—and how social psychological conceptions of property as embedded in social relationships have clashed with the development of the legal doctrine of eminent domain.

This article reviews classic and contemporary case study research in law and social science. Taking as its starting point that legal scholars engaged in case studies generally have a set of questions distinct from those using other research approaches, the essay offers a detailed discussion of three primary contributions of case studies in legal scholarship: theory building, concept formation, and processes/mechanisms. The essay describes the role of case studies in social scientific work and their express value to legal scholars, and offers specific descriptions from classic and contemporary works.

The field of transitional justice has faced several challenges in its relatively short life span. The latest of these challenges is the claim for broadening its scope to incorporate social justice– and development-related matters. And in just a few years, the possibility and adequacy of thicker or more holistic conceptions of transitional justice have become mainstream. Nonetheless, since their beginnings these new approaches have been subject to criticism from both within and outside the field. This article describes the trajectory of the scholarly debate on expanding transitional justice to encompass socioeconomic concerns, as well as its main limitations. It starts by exploring the main reasons that led to the historical marginalization of socioeconomic concerns in transitional justice theory and practice. It then considers the rationale for the implementation of broader approaches to transitional justice and closes with a discussion of the main challenges and limitations these proposals face.

During the early 2000s, several states and municipalities sought to regulate minors’ access to violent video games owing to perceived harms to minors. The resultant case law, culminating in the US Supreme Court case Brown v. EMA (2011), demonstrated court skepticism of the science linking violent games to harm in minors. Such skepticism was increasingly confirmed as numerous newer studies could not link violent games to socially relevant outcomes. In more recent years, there has been a newer focus on sexist games and the harm these might cause. This field appears at risk for repeating some of the problems of the violent game field, including exaggeration of mixed findings, lack of curiosity regarding null findings, and unreliable research designs. By persisting in advancing a narrative of public health crisis, despite evidence to the contrary, social science has risked damaging its reputation in the eyes of the courts.