Contested Modernities in Asian Law and Society: Editor's Introduction to the Special Issue

Modernity has been the idée fixe of law and society scholarship from the very beginning. It is impossible to imagine our field without its roots in the rather different theories of Weber, Marx, and Durkheim about the defining characteristics of a modern legal system; and their theories still resonate in the work of 21st-century researchers. Moreover, pre-modern law and post-modern law, as their names suggest, are also defined and analysed by law and society scholars in relation to the central concept of modernity. Modernity and its pre- and post-incarnations are the very bedrock of the law and society field.