As editors of the Law and Society Review, we have had a number of inquiries about possibilities for special issues. All were great suggestions, based on diverse and engaging ranges of scholarship and scholars. Uncomfortable with an ad hoc process, we put a formal call for special issue proposals up on the journal's website. We received several excellent submissions and the selection of two was tough—all promised exciting collections of essays. Islamic Law, Society, and the State is the first of the two selected special issues—actually a kind of “mini” special issue as the focus takes up a part, not the whole, of the issue.
It has been a pleasure to work with Tamir Moustafa and Jeffrey Adam Sachs as the special issue editors. In their framing article, the special issue editors set out an informative backdrop to the collection and introduce the reader to the richness of the articles that follow. As well, Jennifer Balint, our book review editor, came onboard, gathering book reviews that are on theme. Jennifer has been a wonderful book review editor: efficient, flexible, and diligent. We hope to have one more mini special issue in press before our editorship wraps up, and promise that the next focus will be as timely and critical as this one.
As we mentioned, this issue also includes three other articles. These pieces—Sandra R. Levitsky, Rachel Kahn Best, and Jessica Garrick's “‘Legality with a Vengeance’: Re-Claiming Distribution for Socio-Legal Studies”; Amelia Thorpe's “Pop-up Property: Enacting Ownership from San Francisco to Sydney”; and Mona Lynch and Marisa Omori's “Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Drug Prosecutions and the Production of Black-White Racial Inequality”—expand the breadth of this issue in valuable ways.
So, enjoy this mini special issue and the articles and reviews that accompany it.
Jeannine Bell, Susan Sterett, Margot Young
