Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Studies

Roger Cotterrell is Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London. Educated as both a lawyer and a sociologist, he has written widely on jurisprudence, sociology of law, and comparative law, and has devoted much of his career to building conversations between the contrasting traditions of jurisprudence and sociology of law. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. His book Sociological Jurisprudence, published by Routledge in 2018, won the international Dennis Mahoney Prize for Legal Theory in 2022.

Preface xiii

Introduction: Mapping Inquiries about Law 1

About Jurisprudence 1

About Socio-Legal Studies 3

About Sociology of Law 5

Profiles in Pre-Hart Jurisprudence 8

How to Build Bridges 10

PART I

A Terrain of Socio-Legal Inquiry 11

1 The Development of Sociology of Law 13

Living Law: A Problem for State Law? 15

Escaping the Limits of Living Law 18

Legal Pluralism and the State 22

Rethinking ‘Law’ and ‘Society’ 24

2 The Identity and Function of Sociology of Law 26

A Stepchild among the Disciplines 26

Sociology of Law as a Field of Practice 29

The Problem of the Concept of Law 33

Instability and Promise 36

3 The Place of Values in Socio-Legal Studies 39

Ultimate Values in Regulatory Practice 41

How Instrumentalism Marginalises Values 44

Culture and Community 47

Tendencies towards Cultural Closure 49

Values in Socio-Legal Theory 52

4 Legal Culture and Cultural Diversity 56

Components of Culture 57

A Politics of Legal Culture 59

Legal Culture in the Conference Room 61

Cultural Self-Sufficiency 63

Law and Culture across State Boundaries 65

Culture as an Umbrella Concept 66

5 Socio-Legal Studies and the Law School 68

A View from the Law School 68

Legal Scholars and Social Theory 73

PART II

Juristic Radicals as Socio-Legal Pioneers 77

6 Jurisprudence in Context 79

Theory and Variation in Socio-Legal Inquiry 79

A Bricolage Method 81

Scope and Uses of Jurisprudential Theory 84

Four Jurists and Their Times 87

7 The Jurist as Humanist Polymath (Petrażycki) 94

Petrażycki in the World of Jurists 95

Petrażycki’s Influence on Legal Sociology 98

Petrażycki and Current Socio-Legal Inquiry 101

Petrażycki’s Hidden Legacy 111

8 The Jurist as Legal Sociologist (Ehrlich) 112

The Relativity of Centres and Peripheries 113

Ehrlich in Empire and Culture 116

Responses to Radicalism 119

The State and Social Associations 122

Ehrlich’s Concept of Law 124

An Assessment 128

9 Radical Legal Pluralism in the Shadow of Fascism (Romano) 130

An Enigmatic Classic 131

Legal Pluralism for Lawyers 132

Legal Pluralism for Social Scientists 133

Romano’s Juristic Radicalism 135

An Institutional Theory 136

The Rise of Fascism and the Context of

The Legal Order 139

Legal Pluralism in Contemporary Politics 141

An Uncertain Role for the State 144

The Limits of a Lawyer’s Focus 146

10 A Functional Jurisprudence for the Welfare State (Lundstedt) 147

A Method of Reading Juristic Theories 147

The View from Afar: Lundstedt Abroad 149

Lundstedt in Swedish Context 154

A Wider Context: The Jurist’s Role 159

PART III

Mapping Intersecting Fields 165

11 Parallel Histories: Jurisprudence and Social Science 167

Law in the Evolution of Sociology 168

Sociology in the Perspective of Jurists 171

Pathways to Collaboration 176

The Memory of Pioneers 182

12 Contemporary Interactions: Legal Theory and Social Theory 183

Theme 1: Legal Individualism 184

Theme 2: Law’s Autonomy and Identity 187

Theme 3: Law and Power 189

Theme 4: Law as an Integrative Mechanism 192

Theme 5: Law in and beyond the State 195

Conclusion 197

13 Linked Futures: Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Studies 199

The Identity of Socio-Legal Studies 200

The Identity of Jurisprudence 203

Three Themes for the Present and Future 208

References 214

Index 232