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How should socio‐legal studies view jurisprudence, the legal theory of jurists? Jurisprudence's task is to promote law as a socially valuable idea taking various forms in different times and places. As a value‐oriented and context‐focused enterprise, it should draw on the social sciences to make its inquiries relevant in a changing socio‐legal world. Correspondingly, socio‐legal research needs theory to link its empirical inquiries to an overall sense of what can be hoped for from law as a social phenomenon. In different ways, jurisprudence and socio‐legal inquiry should help to theorize the nature of legal practice and legal experience. They are necessarily distinct enterprises with contrasting orientations, but they can aid each other in important ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that socio‐legal studies (SLS) should engage with ultimate values, in Max Weber's sense, insofar as these influence law and social action linked to law. The article sketches orientations in socio‐legal research that have deterred concern with such values. It suggests a way to conceptualize values as a component of culture, and illustrates this by reference to aspects of the regulation of religious and ethnic minorities, on the one hand, and business and financial networks, on the other. Finally, it considers how SLS's commitment to science impacts on the study of values. It argues that empirically‐grounded socio‐legal theory can suggest why and how certain ultimate values come to seem meaningful and relevant in particular social conditions. As components of cultural experience, values relate to law in complex ways, and SLS can and should give more attention to this relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with major books that have influenced the authors. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André-Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, and Roger Brownsword. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas (of Karl Polanyi and others) that economies and markets are 'socially embedded' are central to recent research in economic sociology, closely paralleling socio-legal claims for studying law in 'social context'. But the concept of embeddedness is imprecise and inadequate: a sociology of law and economy cannot rely on it but must address intellectual and moral-political concerns that its use reflects. Max Weber's writings on law and economy have inspired advocates of a new economic sociology of law, but some of Weber's key claims may be outdated, and he treats law and economy as distinct spheres rather than as facets of the social. Sociological research on law and economy should focus on 'networks of community' and their regulation, thus illuminating the social character of both law and economic relations. Viewing the social (including economic life) through a 'community lens' makes it possible to analyse cultural factors in regulating markets, while emphasizing links between economic relations and other aspects of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of ‘legal transnationalism’– that is, the reach of law across nation-state borders and the impact of external political and legal pressures on nation-state law – undermines the main foundations of sociology of law. Modern sociology of law has assumed an ‘instrumentalist’ view of law as an agency of the modern directive state, but now it has to adjust to the state's increasingly complex regulatory conditions. The kind of convergence theory that underpins analysis of much legal transnationalism is inadequate for socio-legal theory, and old ideas of ‘law’ and ‘society’ as the foci of sociology of law are no longer appropriate. Socio-legal theory should treat law as a continuum of unstable, competing authority claims. Instead of taking ‘society’ as its reference point, it should conceptualize the contrasting types of regulatory needs of the networks of community (often not confined by nation-state boundaries) that legal transnationalism addresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Selznick enjoys world-wide respect as a sociologist and, unusually among prominent contemporary sociological theorists, he has made law a main focus of his work. A leading pioneer of Anglo-American legal sociology since the 1950s, he has pursued a distinctive scholarly approach, founded in Deweyan pragmatism, that treats ideals and values as fundamental concerns of social science, integral to its methods and aims. This orientation was first developed in his work in the sociology of organizations and is central to his sociology of law and to his writings since the 1980s on communitarianism, which combine philosophical and sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology of law and socio-legal studies are sometimes declared unable to give insight into the nature of legal ideas or to clarify questions about legal doctrine. The idea that law has its own 'truth' -- its own way of seeing the world -- has been used to deny that sociological perspectives have any special claim to provide understanding of law as doctrine. This paper tries to specify what sociological understanding of legal ideas entails. It argues that such an understanding is not merely useful but necessary for legal studies. Legal scholarship entails sociological understanding of law. The two are inseparable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]