The crafty power of text: methods for a sociology of legislative drafting

Abstract: This article proposes that socio‐legal scholars study statutes and legislative drafting on their own terms. Legislative drafting may seem to have little relevance within approaches that emphasize law's wider social effects. Yet statutes can be defamiliarized, and the dynamics through which they are drafted better understood. This can help statutes to answer for their legal and social power and also assist scholars working in law and other disciplines to grasp the distinctiveness of legal doctrine. Drawing on findings from my current research, I argue that sociologies of legislative drafting could contribute to, and be informed by, two contemporary debates: first, the status of legal technical expertise, and second, the aesthetics of law. Unpicking these thickly knotted ontologies of law and drafting could be achieved through historical, ethnographic, and experimental visual methods. These methods potentially help us to tackle something akin to an ‘obviation of legal form’ through which statutory text is seen to be distinct from, and subservient to, law's legal and political substance.