User:InsaneHacker/sandbox/Naming, Blaming, Claiming

"The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming …" is a socio-legal article written by Bill Felstiner, Richard Abel and Austin Sarat and published in the Law & Society Review in 1980. In the article, the authors critique the field of sociology of law at the time for not focusing more on the pre-dispute stage of legal cases, namely how injurious experiences go from being unperceived to being perceived as injurious by those injured ("naming"); how they turn into grievances when the injury is attributed to the fault of another ("blaming"); how those grievances are presented to the blamed party with a request for a remedy ("claiming"); and how they are turned into a dispute when the request is rejected. The process is referred to as the transformation of a dispute. The article further discusses how various factors affect this transformation.

Influence
The article has been hugely influential, being one of the five most cited articles from the Law & Society Review as of 2016. It has been described as a "one of the most groundbreaking articles on the pre-legal phase and the legal transformation [of disputes]" and as having had "decisive analytical effect on countless studies concerning the transformation of a social problem into a legal case", as well as being "truly seminal research". A 2020 literature review found 572 articles between the publication and June 2018 had referred to the article or used the naming, blaming and claiming framework. In 2011, it was awarded the Lasting Contribution Award by the American Political Science Association's Law and Courts section.

According to Olesen and Hammerslev, Pierre Bourdieu was heavily inspired by the article when he developed the framework for the sociological study of law expressed in his seminal article "The Force of Law", which also devotes much attention to the transformation of disputes.