Northern Lights: From Swedish Realism to Sociology of Law

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.     

Law in Culture

Abstract. 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.     

Sociological interpretations of legal development

This paper seeks to outline some ways in which sociological inquiry has helped to interpret general processes of legal development. It comments on a few aspects of a vast subject. Furthermore, it was commissioned in a specific context of debate: as part of an agenda of discussion of the relative merits and potential of sociological and economic analyses of law. Hence, to provide a setting for what I try to argue about the character and value of sociological interpretations of legal change, it seems appropriate to preface those arguments with some general ideas about the nature of sociological inquiries in legal contexts and about perceived contrasts between the orientation of these inquiries and what I take to be certain orientations in economic analysis of law. Accordingly this paper is in two parts. The first offers a few prefatory remarks on the character of theoretically guided sociological inquiries about law (sociology of law). The second discusses various kinds of interpretation of legal development, which have been offered from the perspectives of sociology of law.     

Selznick Interviewed: Philip Selznick in Conversation with Roger Cotterrell

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.     

What Is Transnational Law?

Is it important to conceptualize transnational law and “map” it as a new legal field? This article suggests that to do so might help both juristic practice and sociolegal scholarship in organizing, linking, and comparing disparate but increasingly significant types of regulation. To explore the idea of transnational law is to raise basic questions about the nature of both “law” and “society” (taken as the realm law regulates). This involves radically rethinking relationships between the public and the private, between law and state, and between different sources of law and legal authority. Taking as its focus Von Daniels's The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective and Calliess and Zumbansen's Rough Consensus and Running Code (both 2010), the article considers what approaches may be most productive, and what key issues need to be addressed, to make sense of broad trends in law's extension beyond the boundaries of nation‐states.     

The Politics of Jurisprudence Revisited: A Swedish Realist in Historical Context

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.