ABSTRACT
Within legal scholarship there are many different approaches to the study of law. To those legal scholars (known as black letter lawyers), dedicated to studying the meaning of statutes and judicial decisions by reference to nothing more than the words found in statutes and the judgements of the higher courts, an engagement with identity politics, social and cultural theory in general and queer theory in particular would be scholarly heresy. Other approaches to the study of law, that seek to examine the day to day operation of law, or examine its role in society more generally, or seek to understand the impact and operation of the wider political, social and cultural forces in and upon the law, are more open to the use of political, social and cultural theory in a variety of ways. It is in this context that queer has been influential. Most legal scholarship that has engaged with queer is to be found in law and society scholarship and critical legal studies.
