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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 argues that juristic theories must be understood in relation to the historical conditions in which they have emerged. This is not to reduce theories to their context but to gain essential insight into their aims, meaning, and scope with the aid of such "external" reference points. Here I use the ideas of the Swedish legal realist Vilhelm Lundstedt to illustrate these claims, choosing his juristic theory for this purpose specifically because it has been so widely seen (at least by non-Scandinavian interpreters) as deeply puzzling and "extreme." The article argues that his central ideas are readily intelligible in historical context. But such a contextual examination of juristic ideas also makes it possible to assess what in them can properly travel beyond immediate context: in other words, what insights about the nature of the jurist's task can legitimately be taken from them for more universal application. Lundstedt's work, despite having been largely ignored or excluded from international juristic debate, has something to offer here if seen through a contextualising lens that sets the possibilities for its broader application in sharp relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the tenets of contemporary Anglo-American legal philosophy as of 2014. The topics discussed include different approaches to legal scholarship, difference between jurisprudence and philosophy of law, and characteristics of legal philosophy including contemporary legal positivism (CLP). Also discussed are legal theorists Lon Fuller and Karl Llewellyn's views works on law and its practice.

Many different kinds of professionals work with law, but often they seek to use law for particular governmental or private purposes, they focus on some specific areas or aspects of its creation, interpretation or application, or they study it for its interest judged by criteria that are given by fields of scholarly practice outside it. Is there a special significance for a role exclusively concerned with analysing, protecting and enhancing the general well-being or worth of law as a practical idea? This article argues that such a role is important. Building on Gustav Radbruch's juristic thought, it asks how that role could be elaborated and how a professional responsibility for discharging it might be envisaged. Many professionals concerned with law adopt such a role incidentally or intermittently, but it needs more prominence and clear demarcation. The article suggests that it might be seen as the specialised role of the jurist, treated as a particular kind of legal professional. The term 'jurist' would then have not just an honorific connotation. It would indicate a Weberian 'pure' type that may approximate some current understandings of 'juristic' practice; but it would also identify a normative ideal-something intrinsically valuable. Seen in this way, the jurist is one who assumes a certain unique responsibility for law. [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]

Émile Durkheim’s claims about justice, human dignity and the value system of moral individualism in complex modern societies are part of the canon of classical theoretical ideas that underpin social research. Yet these claims are often neglected in socio-legal studies or seen as remote from much current Western legal experience. This article examines Durkheim’s sociological conceptions of justice, dignity and individualism to demonstrate their usefulness for the study of legal values in contemporary Western societies. Applying these ideas to such diverse clusters of topics as punishment and the use of torture, on the one hand, and sexuality and the wearing of Islamic headscarves, on the other, it argues that his work sheds important new light on current legal controversies and provides enduring insights for a developing sociology of legal values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The proliferation of forms of transnational regulation, often unclear in their relation to the law of nation states but also, in some cases, claiming authority as “law,” suggests that the concept of law should be reconsidered in the light of processes associated with globalisation. This article identifies matters to be taken into account in any such reconsideration: in particular, ideas of legal pluralism, of degrees of legalisation, and of relative legal authority. Regulatory authority should be seen as ultimately based in the diverse moral conditions of the networks of community which regulation serves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper concentrates on Paul Huvelin's work as a response to, and adaptation of, Emile Durkheim's sociology. The author used a study of Huvelin to illustrate certain problems which Durkheim's ideas posed for sympathetic jurists. The paper considers how one particular legal scholar tried to overcome these, using elements of Durkheim's thinking to develop general sociological insights about law and its history.

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]

The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect. The consequence is that legal theory must, it seems, now systematically take account of the notion of culture. The present paper asks how this might best be done. I argue that a concept of culture, as such, is of limited utility for legal theory because the term “culture” embraces a too indefinite and disparate range of phenomena. But legal theory needs conceptual resources to consider at a general level the relations of law and culture. This paper suggests that these resources should include, above all, a rigorous distinguishing of different abstract types of community. Legal theory requires a sociologically-informed concept of community. What is encompassed by the vague idea of culture is actually the content of different types of social relations of community and the networks (combinations) in which they exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the role of jurisprudence in legal education in Great Britain. Conflict messages regarding the significance of jurisprudence; Kinds of material presented in introductory textbooks; Idea of canon of classical literature.

Abstract. The claim that media `simulate' political transparency is misleading. It suggests that the `simulated' exists in opposition to the `real' or `true' and, in turn, that transparency should give access to a political reality or `truth' otherwise distorted. This truth or reality is, however, illusory. Transparency should be seen as a process of requiring persons in relations of community with others to account for their actions, understandings and commitments as regards matters directly relevant to those relations. Such an approach denies any simple public-private divide, emphasises breach of trust in (diverse kinds of) relations of community as the justification for publicising personal conduct and circumstances, and treats scandal (as a matter of legitimate news) as the public revelation of these breaches of trust. [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]