Around 2,500 of the world’s leading law and society scholars converged in Denver for the 2024 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. But before the meeting’s sixtieth anniversary, the most recent issue of LSA’s flagship journal, Law & Society Review, looked back on past president and ABF Research Professor Laura Beth Nielsen’s outgoing presidential address, delivered at the 2023 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in San Juan.
Nielsen used her presidential address, “Relational Rights,” now published in Law & Society Review, to talk about the need for a relational rights approach to law and society, which she defined as “a theory of rights—of law itself—that recognizes relationships as crucial to justice and social well-being and tasks the law with constructing and supporting those healthy relationships and the underlying structures that support them.”
During her speech, Nielsen called back to foundational works that formed the basis of relational rights, built on more recently by scholars like Jennifer Nedelsky, Martha Fineman, Bonnie Honig, and Michael McCann. Nielsen then took the audience through examples of three areas of law in which a relational rights approach is helpful: Title IX and the regulation of consent to sex on college campuses, gun violence and Second Amendment rights, and the system of mass incarceration.
Title IX is a subject of current research for Nielsen with the project “Consent to Sex on Campus: How Undergraduates Understand and Enact Sexual Consent in the Title IX Era.” In her address, using hand-painted signs outside fraternity houses reminding undergraduates coming to parties about consent, she explained how students receive the law from the point of view of their own intersectional identities, their own systems of knowledge and beliefs. These relationships in turn shape how the law is deployed.
Regarding gun rights, Nielsen argued that an individualized approach to the right to bear arms neglects relational context, specifically individuals’ relationship to a state that they perceive to be failing their communities: “What we can do to prevent gun violence…is enact policies that address underlying causes, enlist the state in improving structures that preserve community, and ameliorate violence to improve the possibilities and futures for everyone.”
Nielsen also praised ABF Research Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller’s Halfway Home, which offers a relational rights analysis of how incarceration invades the lives of African American men and their families. “Mass incarceration,” she noted, summarizing Miller’s book, “represents the antithesis of a relational rights regime. [It] effectively attacks the relationships that would lead to better lives, [particularly] for families struggling in poverty.”
In her concluding remarks, Nielsen emphasized the collective responsibility of the audience as scholars of law and society: “As individuals and as an association, we must lead by example and consider the kinds of relationships in which we do our work…. We work at universities that benefit from nonprofit status, we accept grants that come from taxpayer funds, and then we publish our findings behind paywalls. Our obligation is not just to study. It is to translate, communicate, and advocate with various publics—especially those who disagree with us, be they policymakers, judges, lawyers, or ordinary citizens.”
The address concluded on a hopeful note, as she reiterated her belief in the power of law and society to enact change: “Don’t get me wrong, challenges are everywhere. This kind of scholarship and world view requires us to welcome those we fear, empathize with those who hurt us, and advocate for the least of these. But we are uniquely equipped with tools to creatively reimagine the world, our national political projects, decarceration, gun violence, sexual assault, and many other problems created and sustained by law. I invite you to unleash that creativity.”
In “Toward a Politic of Welcome: A Response to Laura Beth Nielsen’s Presidential Address,” Miller agreed with the suggestion that a relational rights approach can enable the creation of more effective laws that support healthy social interactions: “Nielsen’s presidential address is more than an intervention in how we study the law; her remarks resonate with a path toward a more just future. Through relational rights, Nielsen offers a reimagining of law and society scholarship that asks our field to look anew at the role of law in our lives…. This is an important move in light of the harms that the law has produced.”
###
About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.