Law and order on a beer mat: the intellectual tourist

This paper explores the troubled relationship between normative aspirations for social order/pro-sociality and law as a vehicle for promoting social goods. It questions how we problematise this relationship through using insights from other disciplines (whether described as monodisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity etc.). Placing particular purchase on the need to think about aspirations for pro-sociality from a human behavioural / sociological approach as a means of appropriately critiquing the role that law could or might (not) play in furthering social goods, the paper concerns itself with methodological considerations of investigating insights from “foreign‟ knowledge domains. Focusing upon a range of recent contributions to social theory and law which claim to draw upon a behavioural framework for advocating a rethink of policy approaches, the work explores the promise and limits of intellectual transplants from one domain of knowledge to another. Grounded in the sociological theory of expertise, the paper seeks to draw attention to the contradictory and often complex nature of empirical research in the human-behavioural sciences, and the critical importance of assessing the promise and limits of what those insights can tell us about the relationship between human behaviour, social order and law. As such, it sets the scene for the development of an investigatory technique informed by social epistemology, its application is for addressing what is called ‘intellectual tourism’ whereby legal (and other) researchers explore insights and gain inspiration from other fields (foreign domain theorising). The central aim of the technique is to foster both intellectual creativity and epistemic caution for the legal researcher in drawing inspiration from other bodies of knowledge in which one lacks individual expertise