Legacies of Legal Realism: The Sociology of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice

Abstract

In this article, I trace the history of the sociology of law from its roots at Yale Law School to the present. The legal realists, situated at Yale Law in the 1930s, saw the law as an instrument of policy. Building on this foundation, the Yale Law faculty pioneered the sociology of law in the 1950s, and the Russell Sage Foundation supported the then-emerging field's development in the 1960s. Philip Selznick was a major theorist and institution builder in the field, and my own writing has stressed how the sociology of law has challenged American ideology regarding economic, gender, and social equality. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the current racial distribution of the prison population. The legal realist vision first developed at Yale Law—of constitutional law as an instrument of social policy—was also confirmed by the most recent 2012 US Supreme Court decisions on immigration and health care.