Images of Law and Violence in Everyday Life: Lessons from the Regulation of Sports

Building upon Stewart Macaulay's earlier observations that spectator sports convey important images and meanings about legal authority in everyday life, this review considers how organized sports constitute an influential field of legality. Focusing on the regulation of violence, we explain how the management of on- and off-field violence helps to ensure the social acceptability of certain forms of aggression and secures the profitability of commercial sports. To do so, we survey research on how the regulation of ritualistic violence helps legitimate sports-related violence and complicates athletes’ consent to violence, responses to gendered harms and organizational violence in sports, and how regulatory activities in sports enable other forms of violence. We conclude by considering sociolegal lessons from the study of sports. Like the logics of law, sports rarely aim to end violence but instead negotiate their entangled relationships with violence as they attempt to control and channel its distribution.