ABSTRACT
Popular justice: in search of a concept The sociology of law has long failed to understand the nature of popular justice. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has viewed it as central to the discipline, but he notes the increasing vagueness of discussion, so that ‘the core debate is increasingly a debate about what is being debated’ (1992, p 132). He further notes the failure to emphasise the challenge that popular justice makes to liberal political and legal theory, in particular to the understanding of the state and law as autonomous forms. My argument will be, inverting and extending his point, that the failure to understand popular justice itself also results from the failure to challenge the liberal idea of law. Until we interrogate fully a certain way of understanding law, we will not understand popular justice. The latter term covers a number of different phenomena, but what governs its conceptual possibility in the sociology of law is the relationship of ‘otherness’ that is established between it and a liberal conception of law. If we challenge the concepts of liberal legality, moving from a critique of law to an understanding of popular justice, we will find a more adequate way of talking about the latter. If we do not do so, our comparative understanding of different systems of rule, particularly those we call popular justice, will remain imprecise.
