In her review and assessment of the sociology of law, Arlene Sheskin argues that Pound, Ehrlich and Timasheff make certain assumptions about the law which are common in sociological and the sociology of law, but which preclude more accurate explanations of legal phenomena. According to Sheskin, traditional theories and research in the sociology of law assume among other things that: 1) the law neutrally reflects the common interests of the populace; and 2) conformity to the law is based on consensus. Sheskin suggests that more accurate and complete theories of law can be developed if we reject these traditional assumptions and recognize that: 1) the law is determined by and reflects the interests of the economically dominant classes; and 2) conformity to the law is often based on power and coercion. Sheskin is not alone in her assessment of the predominant assumptions underlying the sociology of law, or in her suggestion of an alternative approach to the study of legal phenomena. Elliott Currie, for example, writes that the dominant model of law and society in contemporary legal sociology is a pluralist and meliorist interpretation of American society and the American legal system, intellectually rooted in classical bourgeois sociology and in liberal jurisprudence (1971:137). He contends that some of the most important presuppositions in the sociology of law include the conception of law as the outcome of pluralistic competition among various groups, and the tendency to view legal institutions in isolation from the broader framework of