This article gives an interpretation of the empirical work of the well-known sociologist of law Erhard Blankenburg, who passed away in the Spring of 2018. He conducted interesting and intelligent research on the process of ‘mobilization of law’. The thesis of this article is that Blankenburg’s empirical approach is actually guided and stimulated by normative considerations. A complete and coherent picture of the concrete utilization of legal instruments shows that ‘alternative’ ways of dealing with problems and disputes are often morally preferable as they are inspired by a realistic assessment of persons-in-a-social-context.

This contribution explains what access to justice can encompass and how the ideals about access to justice have developed in time. The way to do this is going back to the work of the famous scholars Cappelletti and Garth, who were responsible for a worldwide project on access to justice in the 1970s. Their main issue was to explain access to justice is more than the access to a judge and the organization of courts. Primarily, the system must be equally accessible to all, irrespective of social or economic status or other incapacity. But it also must lead to results that are individually and socially just and fair. Equal access and effective access are the central notions. Their work is put in perspective. The importance of their legacy and the question how we can get along with their work are stressed. Their definition is compared to a few other authoritative definitions. The waves in the history of access to justice are described and putting them in the current context illustrates why a fourth waved can be observed. The major question to be answered is how one can assess the challenges and obstacles of access to justice in the current context. Therefore, some recent dimensions and developments within access to justice are presented: the democratic dimension, the effectiveness of new social rights, the attention for poor and vulnerable people, further juridification, expanding frontiers of and monitoring access to justice, e-justice, and self-help. Finally, a few building blocks for reforms are presented.

A very large number of people experience everyday legal problems considered by them to be serious and difficult to resolve, the vast majority say it is important to resolve these problems, and virtually everybody experiencing legal problems takes some action to resolve them. However, the fact that very few people make use of the formal justice system suggests that the justice system is not meeting the legal needs of the public. One response would be to expand the traditional formal justice system to include an early-resolution services sector. An ERSS would encompass the early intervention and supported self-help objectives of many existing access to justice initiatives, but would go farther by conceiving what we mean by the justice system more broadly in a way that would accommodate what the everyday legal problems approach tells us about how the public experiences legal problems.

In continental Europe, post-war sociology of law passed through diverse phases, swinging between grand theorizing and empirical research. In the last two decades, socio-legal studies have shown a more balanced approach with respect to these models. Neo-functionalism à-la Luhmann still takes the lead in high theory, although some more eclectic voices make themselves heard and some signs of renaissance of conflict theories have become visible again. Through an overview of the recent editorial policy of three influential journals in France, Germany and Italy, the author highlights that middle range socio-legal theory has successfully dealt with some relevant aspects of legal change of the last decades, in such fields as criminal justice, migrations, or family law. Yet, it has left aside other and no less important aspects, such as commerce and property laws, common goods, environment, and other crucial questions of our times. Thus, there is a risk for sociology of law not to perform its critical and pioneering task that belongs to its own tradition.

In a neoliberal age governments, NGOs, food producers and retailers all state that the food system can be governed via consumer choice aka voting with your fork. This makes the retail food label an important space for contests between different actors who each seek to govern the food system according to their own interests and priorities. The paper argues that this makes it crucial to ‘backwards map’ the regulatory governance networks behind the governance claims staked on food labels. The paper uses the example of the contested meaning of ‘free-range’ claims on animal products in Australia to propose and illustrate a methodology for this backwards mapping.

In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.