Producing the product: A case study of law and its absence

In this article, we seek to develop socio-legal studies through arupturing of the ideas behind the social and the legal, ideas that aremost often presumed to exist and are used to explain that which isalready there. The ubiquity of law and the omniscience of society havebecome givens. We use a product called shared ownership as a casestudy, arguing that the product was given life by a legal document (thelease) which itself represented the translation of a range of differentperspectives and audiences (albeit not the consumer), and which, itself,has been translated, most notably in a 2008 High Court decision. Thatdecision counterintuitively found that the lease had created an assuredshorthold tenancy (albeit a long one) but, despite its threat to theproduct, has been largely ignored. We discuss the processes of, andreasons for, the translation through which that ignorance has beeninduced.