Annual Review Article on Images of Law and Violence in Everyday Life

Meredith Edelman, Tate Morgan and I have a new article in the new volume of Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Inspired by Stewart Macaulay’s 1986 Law and Society Association Presidential Address, Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports, we revisit his observations through an analysis of contemporary organised sports. We approach them as constituting an influential field of legality that offers broader lessons about the relationships between law, violence, and society. The article is online and free to access.

Images of Law and Violence in Everyday Life: Lessons from the Regulation of Sports

Authors: Kathryn Henne, Tate Morgan, and Meredith Edelman

Abstract: Building upon Stewart Macaulay’s earlier observations that spectator sports convey important images and meanings about legal authority in everyday life, this review considers how organized sports constitute an influential field of legality. Focusing on the regulation of violence, we explain how the management of on- and off-field violence helps to ensure the social acceptability of certain forms of aggression and secures the profitability of commercial sports. To do so, we survey research on how the regulation of ritualistic violence helps legitimate sports-related violence and complicates athletes’ consent to violence, responses to gendered harms and organizational violence in sports, and how regulatory activities in sports enable other forms of violence. We conclude by considering sociolegal lessons from the study of sports. Like the logics of law, sports rarely aim to end violence but instead negotiate their entangled relationships with violence as they attempt to control and channel its distribution.