Mathieu Deflem
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This is the manuscript version of a paper in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy, edited by John Linarelli. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, December 2026.
Please cite as: Deflem, Mathieu. 2026. “Sociology of Law.” Pp. 506-509 in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy, edited by John Linarelli. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Abstract: The sociology of law is reviewed as it has developed since the classical era, especially with respect to questions of theory. The classical scholars of sociology attributed a central place to law in society, but their works were initially more influential in the legal scholarship of jurisprudence rather than in sociology. The modernization of the classical tradition after World War II, however, would change this situation and allow for multiple perspectives in the sociology of law to be developed. Both theoretical innovation as well as empirical research on the basis of advanced methodologies have since marked the sociology of law until today. Recent redirections in terms of novel theoretical perspectives likewise show the maturity of the sociology of law as a well-recognized specialty field. A need now exists to unify theoretical perspectives in the sociology of law and reconnect its disciplinary foundations to the broader aims of social theory.
Keywords: jurisprudence; law; legal philosophy; norms; social control; sociological theory.
The origins of the sociology of law as a specialty in the broader discipline of sociology date back to the great works of the classical scholars who ushered in the birth of the new science of sociology from the late 19th-century onwards. In relation to earlier traditions in the philosophy of law following the Enlightenment, the sociological approach to the study of law was devoted to theoretically informed systematic empirical inquiries concerning the actual place and role of law in society independent of any normative concerns or aspirations. Despite its classical roots, the sociology of law was not fully institutionalized as a sociological specialty until the latter half of the 20th century, a development that is largely due to the monopolization of legal thought by the legal profession. Because of the intrinsically strong normative qualities of law, the sociological study of legal norms and practices retains an important relation to the questions and concerns that move broader concerns in social theory (Deflem 2008).
It is a fortuitous circumstance for sociologists interested in the study of law and law-related phenomena that the founders of the discipline already devoted great attention to the study of law. Sociology was born out of the intellectual urge to address the important questions and problems that marked modern societies in scientific terms rather than the ideal constructs of earlier trends in social philosophy. Sociology was born out of, and broke away from, the philosophical thought of the 18th and 19th century that approached social and political conditions in normative terms as being ether ideal or undesirable. Whether such speculations were oriented at the conservation of the social order or, instead, were revolutionary in their aspirations was less relevant to the birth of sociology as was the turn towards historically informed social philosophy. The incorporation of history, in such works as the legal philosophy of Henry Maine and the historical materialism of Karl Marx, moved philosophy from its thinking on the basis of an abstract ideal towards a more empirically grounded basis. Classical sociology would adopt such historical (and comparative) thinking but also revolutionize it towards the development of a social-science approach geared at analysis rather than critique.
While Marx paid only minimal attention to the study of law within a framework dominated and curtailed by its materialist preoccupation with the economic infrastructure, both Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, the two acknowledged masters of classical sociological thought, devoted much attention to the study of law in society (Deflem 2008). Max Weber was educated in (academic) law and wrote his dissertation on medieval and Roman law. What is masterful about Weber’s (1922) turn towards the development of a sociology of law is his recognition of the important differences between the perspectives of the philosophy of law (as a normative approach), the internal study of law (oriented at providing training in, and consistency to, legal systems), and the external perspective of law (aimed at analysis of law from multiple academic perspectives, including sociology). In its application, Weber’s sociology of law reveals the essential elements of his theoretical position in arguing for the multi-dimensional nature of the rationalization of modern law. Specifically, Weber argued, modern law is most centrally rationalized to become codified, impersonal, and impartial under influence of rationalization processes in politics (increasing bureaucratization), economy (the expansion of capitalism), culture (secularization), and law itself (the professionalization of lawyers), among which four institutional spheres there exists an elective affinity.
In the work of Emile Durkheim, law occupies a central pace as well, because Durkheim treated law as the visible empirical indicator of the changing nature of social solidarity in the historical move towards modernity. At the level of society, Durkheim (1893) argued, mechanical solidarity is gradually replaced by organic solidarity because once strong common belief systems have, under influence of growing individualism, made way for a plurality of values. Formal systems of modern law indicate this important transition in that repressive law is supplemented with restitutive law. Whereas repressive legal orders represent the unity of society, most typically in religious terms, restitutive law reflects the differences among the legal subjects as individuals contributing to a secular social order. To account for this transformation, Durkheim advocated an idealist theory to argue that the social division of labor in modern society is brought about not only by certain demographic developments (an increase in social volume and social density) but also, and most importantly, by a weakening of the influence of tradition and an increase in individualism.
In its further development, the study of law was initially not a central concern in the sociological discipline. The classical scholars’ contributions to the study of law were in the earlier half of the 20th century better known among legal scholars (in jurisprudence) rather than among sociologists. Yet, these jurisprudential intellectual movements would gradually also make way for the development of a truly sociological approach to the study of law (Deflem 2008). In Europe, legal scholarship received an impulse towards sociology through the work of Leon Petrazycki, who as a law professor in St. Petersburg and Warsaw argued for a realistic non-normative study of law. While Petrazycki formulated this realist approach in psychological terms, several of his students transposed the approach to the social level. Among them were specifically the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (whose work was distinctly sociological but did not devote systematic attention to law) as well as Nicholas Timasheff and Georges Gurvitch, the latter two writing about law extensively throughout their respective careers, with variable impact in the United States and France, respectively.
In the United States, the theoretical move towards the sociology of law occurred under influence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who argued that law was related to a nation’s development, and his later jurisprudential followers, especially the Harvard scholar Roscoe Pound. Focused on studying the actual workings of the law in society (law in action) regardless of law’s intent in theory (law in the books), Pound (1942) relied on a notion of law as a form of social control, the latter concept having been elaborated by sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross. Pound labeled this perspective ‘sociological jurisprudence’ to denote that the jurisprudential aspiration to provide a consistent legal system should benefit from sociological insights on the workings of law in concrete social settings.
Roughly coinciding with the development of sociological jurisprudence, sociologist Talcott Parsons began to introduce the great works of the European sociologists to the United States. It is no doubt the single greatest contribution of Parsons that he thereby modernized the classical tradition to launch the institutionalization of modern sociology (and, by implication, also influence the contemporary sociology of today) and, also, lay the groundwork for the various theoretical traditions and disputes that mark the discipline until today. It is of special note to observe the centrality of law in Parsons’ (1978) sociological theory, specifically the integrative function he assigned to law in the overall maintenance of the social order. Parsons thereby particularly centered on the role of the legal profession in mediating between the law as a specialized order of rule and the public to whom these rules apply. With modern society’s value system functioning as the sub-constitutional stratum of law, Parsons argued for the relevance of culture and its influence on law and the democratic necessity of the autonomy of law relative to political power.
In response to the dominance of Parsons’ thinking and the functional-structuralist school, several alternative theoretical perspectives began to develop in sociology with increasingly favorable response from the 1960s onwards. At least three such divergent approaches can be differentiated in sociological theory, each with distinct implications for, and applications in, the sociology of law (Deflem 2008).
First, the emergence of conflict-theoretical perspectives in sociology challenged the functionalist emphasis on equilibrium and order. While the 1950s and 1960s already saw the appearance of critical sociology in the works of such influential scholars as C. Wright Mills and Lewis Coser, sociologists of law did not begin to adopt such theoretical models until they were first empirically introduced to the study of specific legal phenomena and then at first rather unsystematically became a conceptual concern. It would not be until as late as the 1980s that works began to develop to systematically develop perspectives on Marxism and law along with similar critical perspectives.
Second, the relationship between law and morality and, from contrasting perspectives, the possibility and desirability of a scientific sociology of law have greatly preoccupied scholars studying law sociologically. On the one hand, some scholars have argued in favor of a jurisprudential sociology to suggest that sociological studies of law should connect their research findings and insights with the fundamental problems of legal philosophy in order to inform normative debates on law. Others have objected to any such normative aspirations to argue for a resolutely scientific and detached approach to the study of law. The perspective of pure sociology proposed by Donald Black (1976), most clearly, argues that law must be studied, irrespective of any normative considerations, in terms of law's measurable behavior in quantity and kind.
As a third theoretical development in modern sociology, interactionist and behaviorist perspectives have responded to the functionalist preoccupation with society at the macro level. While these micro-theoretical traditions have for quite some time been elaborated in sociology at large (for instance, in the interactionism of Erving Goffman and the behaviorism of George Homans), their applications in sociology of law are a more recent phenomenon. In stark contrast with the long-standing and wide influence of behaviorism in legal scholarship (in the works of influential scholars as Gary Becker and Richard Posner), for instance, experimental perspectives examining legal behavior in economic-rationalist terms have only recently begun to be developed and remain rather marginal in the specialty field of the sociology of law.
The current state of sociology of law with respect to its theoretical orientations reflects many of the same qualities that mark the state of sociological theory as a whole. There has been a proliferation of new developments that have addressed the challenges of contemporary society since the beginning of the 21st century. In that sense, for instance, such relatively novel perspectives as postmodernism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and race and gender theories have also begun to shape sociological scholarship on law. Because the sociology of law is now better institutionalized as a legitimate specialty area, sociological work on law and law-like phenomena in this sense reflects the same richness and diversity that marks much of contemporary sociology as a whole.
Among the examples of the connectivity of sociology of law to broader currents in social theory mention can be made of the contrasting perspectives of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, both of whose works have strong philosophical qualities but are also much discussed in sociological studies of law. The writings of Foucault have especially been influential in research on social control and punishment. Foucault’s (1975) ideas on discipline and power have especially been applied to contemplate on the transparency that marks much of contemporary society under influence of the spread of technologically advanced systems of surveillance and control. The writings of Habermas (1992) have been most fruitfully used in the analysis of law with respect to the critical role of law in modern nation states committed to the ideals of democracy. With Habermas, also, social scientists interested in the study of law can rely on a theoretical model that elucidates the realities of the actual workings of law in relation to, and at times in contrast with, the continued aspirations of law to provide justice. As such, Foucault and Habermas remind us, in different ways, of the need to develop, and work to build bridges between, the sociology and the philosophy of law within the broader framework of a comprehensive social theory.
It can also be observed that the sociology of law, much like other fields of specialization, is today fragmented into various small niche areas, unconnected in any meaningful conceptual way that would be able to present a unified disciplinary orientation. Moreover, despite their many valuable and valid contributions in research and conceptualization, sociologists of law remain somewhat marginal to the field of sociology as a whole and, worse yet, still have difficulties claiming their rightful place in the study of law relative to legal professionals and (other) legal scholars working and teaching in law schools. Research on race and law, by example, has been advanced with much greater impact by the jurisprudential perspective of Critical Race Theory than by sociological studies on the relevance of race in society. The relatively smaller influence of the sociology of law vis-à-vis jurisprudence is all the more remarkable given the much stronger methodological foundations of sociological research on law as a social reality rather than the speculative jurisprudential musings on law as a normative or practical ideal.
To escape from the stranglehold of jurisprudence on the sociology of law, there are good reasons to suggest that efforts to unite insights from various frameworks should be developed, without losing sociology’s disciplinary foundations into an ill-conceived interdisciplinary law-and-society movement that finds itself lacking a clearly defined scholarly orientation. Worse yet, of course, is the misunderstanding of sociology of law as a perspective within legal studies, which even on logical grounds alone lacks merit. Constructing a coherent scholarly framework in clear theoretical terms, and with all due regard for methodological rigor, will be beneficial both for the sociological study of law-in-society as well as for the reception of the sociology of law and the intellectual benefits it has to offer.
Bibliography
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Deflem, Mathieu. 2008. Sociology of Law: Visions of a Scholarly Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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