Continuation of critical legal sociology, this work includes a set of studies conducted by Boaventura de Sousa Santos over the past four decades on issues of sociology of law. In them, it analyzes, in very different temporal and spatial contexts, the different and complex ways in which the legal order, the law and the courts reflect the processes of social transformation and simultaneously influence them.
The conditions within which the law can be mobilized to improve the lives of the most vulnerable groups and social classes, as well as to reduce social injustice, inequality and discrimination, are very demanding. The social and political experience of recent years suggests that such conditions will be increasingly difficult to obtain and that, consequently, the law will increasingly serve unconditionally the interests of the ruling classes and conservative forces, both in the sphere social as in the political and cultural sphere. However, as some of the studies included in this volume reveal, the tension between hegemonic uses and counterhegemonic uses remains.
This book consolidates the legal sociology of absences and emergencies on which the author has been working since the 1970s.