Law and Sociology: Notes on the Constitution and Confrontations of Disciplines

Abstract

This article was commissioned in a series relating to other disciplines.t However, some caveats must be entered in beginning a paper which seeks to generalise about relationships between law (i.e., in this context, legal studies or legal scholarship) and sociology. To survey the relationships between two such complex and multifaceted intellectual fields in a single article would be impossible.1 No more than a subjective choice of what is centrally important and most properly to be compared and contrasted could be made. Consequently what follows is limited and perhaps idiosyncratic in its choice of issues for discussion. It takes the form of notes on various matters which seem to this writer to be of particular significance in considering the interaction between two intellectual traditions of great importance. It considers some general problems involved in understanding the nature and effects of confrontations between such different fields of knowledge and practice as those of law and sociology; some aspects of as a field of study (and as a discipline) which bear centrally on its relations with sociology; and aspects of sociology's nature and history which seem of particular importance in explaining the history of its involvement with legal study. In the light of these considerations some comments are offered on aspects of the development of the sociology of law and its future. All of these matters are discussed in the particular context of legal studies and sociology in Britain, though much that is written here should have a more general application. But the paper is intended to have a general application in another sense. It will be contended here that in understanding the problems and possibilities of interaction between legal scholarship and sociological inquiry we are involved in considering fundamental questions about the epistemology of legal studies in general and about the possibility of rigorous understanding of law as both a form of intellectual practice and a social phenomenon.