228 ANALYZING DATA
228CHAPTER 12
STUDYING THE CAREERS OF
KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS
Applying Science Studies to Legal Studies
PAMELA BRANDWEIN
Constitutional law has traditionally been the turf of political scientists and law professors, and
so, given that interest, I majored in political science and initially planned to go to law school.
I ended up with a Ph.D. in sociology because I decided to follow the advice of my undergradu-
ate advisor, Kim Scheppele, a sociology–political science hybrid, and pursue graduate studies
under one of her mentors, the sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe. Art later told me I was an “odd”
sociologist, and I suspect the label still holds.
I arrived in graduate school deeply interested in civil rights law and already sold by the argu-
ment that the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was constructed and not “found.” My early
interest in gender studies, which revealed the socially constructed nature of gender categories,
made this seem obvious to me. So did Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality,
which I had also read as an undergraduate. But although legal scholars were routinely empha-
sizing the constructed nature of legal discourse, I found myself drawn to the “how” questions.
Yes, legal discourse was constructed, but how? How were legal meanings constructed? How
were they contested? How did aspects of society get “into” law? The sociology of law, which
focused mainly on the work of lawyering, did not take up these questions. Neither did the law and
society literature, which at that time did not focus on constitutional law. The judicial politics
literature in political science was least helpful, as it remained dominated by the behavioral tradi-
tion that swept the discipline in the 1950s. Legal historians, at least, situated legal decision mak-
ing in its historical context, and I gleaned as much as I could from their work.
As I was in a sociology department, I turned to the sociology of knowledge to find research
tools. I got lucky when Susan Leigh Star, a scholar in a field I had never heard of, the sociology
of scientific knowledge, interviewed for a position in the department. Following the footnotes
in her work, I found my way to various corners of the science studies literature. I have been
lucky, though, not once but twice. A university colleague and political theorist, Douglas Dow,
introduced me to the Cambridge School methods of Pocock and Skinner, two historians of
political discourse. Because I was not formally trained in either science studies or Cambridge
School methods, I did not want to be vulnerable to the criticism that I was using these methods
in a dilettante-ish way. I did my homework and sought out a set of readers whose areas of
expertise combined to cover all the areas in my work. I am still cobbling together a set of
research tools that feels right to me; it is a tool kit that clearly did not come prepackaged.