The Sociological Concept of Law

Abstract

My concern is with a familiar problem of jurisprudence but transplanted to the context of the sociology of The central problem of much of jurisprudence has been that of the definition of law or the specification of the appropriate meaning of the word law. For a great deal of modern jurisprudence this problem has been virtually identical with that of achieving a scientific understanding of For Austin, to define law was to designate the field of a science and to characterise the essential elements of its subject matter. Among more modern writers the search for a definition has been abandoned in favour of the attempt to formulate a concept of law a model of law in something of the manner of the models which natural or social scientists use as guides for the construction of theories and for the formulation of hypotheses to be tested by empirical research. Yet the problem of the concept of law remains central to jurisprudence, something more than a starting point for inquiry. For the sociology of law the objectives of specifying a concept of law are often different from although not indifferent to the concerns of many jurists. My purpose in this paper is to outline in general terms some approaches to specification of a concept of law which have characterised modern sociological study of law, to consider some of their implications and to suggest some reasons why certain conceptualisations of law may be more useful to the sociology of law than others.