Roger Cotterrell

THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW : AN INTRODUCTION

The social basis of law law as an instrument of social change law as an integrative mechanism law, power and ideology the acceptance and legitimacy of law professional guardianship of law judges, courts, disputes the enforcement and invocation of law the prognosis for law.

Why Must Legal Ideas Be Interpreted Sociologically

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.

Transparency, mass media, ideology and community

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.

Transnational communities and the concept of law

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.

Subverting Orthodoxy, Making Law Central: A View of Sociolegal Studies

The promise of sociolegal research varies for different constituencies. For some legal scholars it has been a promise of sustained commitment to moral and political critique of law and to theoretical and empirical analysis of laws social consequences and origins. To continue to deliver on that promise today, sociolegal studies should develop theory in new forms emphasizing the variety of forms of regulation and the moral foundations on which that regulation ultimately depends. It should demonstrate and explore laws roles in the routine structuring of all aspects of social life and its changing character as it faces the challenge of regulating relations of community not bounded solely by the jurisdictional reach of nation states.

A Legal Concept of Community

The concept of community has a new importance for legal theory and legal sociology. It allows an escape from traditional conceptions of the relationship between law, state and political society. It makes possible the development of a pluralistic view of law that realistically recognises powerful globalising and localising pressures shaping contemporary law. Community is best thought of initially in terms of four ideal types of collective involvement, derived from Webers types of social action. These imply different kinds of trusting relationships and different regulatory needs. A sense of attachment and a degree of stability in relationships is also necessary to community. Actual groups combine relationships of community in many different ways. Laws contemporary task is to express and coordinate the regulatory needs surrounding structures of community within and beyond the nation state.

Justice, Dignity, Torture, Headscarves: Can Durkheim’s Sociology Clarify Legal Values?:

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.

Common Law Approaches to the Relationship Between Law and Morality

How are general relations of law and morality typically conceived in an environment of Anglo-saxon common law? This paper considers some classical common law methods and traditions as these have confronted and been overlaid with modern ideas of legal positivism. While classical common law treated a community and its morality as the cultural foundation of law, legal positivisms analytical separation of law and morals, allied with liberal approaches to legal regulation, have made the relationship of legal and moral principles more complex and contested. Using ideas from Durkheims and Webers sociology, I argue that the traditional common law emphasis on an inductive, empirical treatment of moral practices has continuing merit, but in contemporary conditions the vague idea of community embedded in classical common law thought must be replaced with a much more precise conceptualisation of coexisting communities, whose moral bonds are diverse and require a corresponding diversity of forms of legal recognition or protection.

Law's Community: Legal Theory and the Image of Legality

Personal chairs can seem isolated vantage points. Their fields are sometimes esoteric, hidden in obscurity far from general public view, with only a small proportion visible on occasions such as this. But legal theory should be in no way esoteric, though it is too often considered to be so. Theoretical studies of law become remote when law itself is seen as academically remote, as though it can be analysed and understood without constant reference to the specific empirical social conditions of its existence. Legal theory maximizes its vitality and relevance in a rapidly changing social world by remaining permanently sensitive to the specific historic and social contexts, causes, and consequences of legal experience. And to do this, it needs to adopt a broad, open, and selfcritical sociological perspective on law; a perspective continually and consistently informed, reformed, and challenged by social theory and empirical social research, and shaped by an overriding aspiration to extend systematic knowledge of the social world. My object is to consider some vital challenges which I think theoretical studies of law presently face if they are, indeed, to take proper account of laws changing character and conditions of existence. It will be necessary first to say more about the outlook on legal theory that informs discussion here. I want then to suggest how changing ideas about legal regulation are posing fundamental problems which legal theory must address. They amount to the emergence of what will be described later as a new or altered image of legality. Finally, it will be necessary to ask how legal theory is responding, and should respond, to the challenges posed by these changes.

The Rule of Law in Transition: Revisiting Franz Neumann's Sociology of Legality

TH E RULE OF LAW is a concept with which so many writers have wrestled that it might be thought that little remains to be said. This article adopts a special focus to try to develop some manageable and relatively neglected themes in a vast, much discussed subject. It takes, as a basis, central ideas from the German jurist Franz Neumanns important but still insufficiently discussed work! on the Rule of Law and tries to pursue a tentative but specific inquiry in the spirit of Neumann.l Neumanns historical study of the Rule of Law (1986; and see 1957), written in the 1930s,was strongly coloured by the experience of the constitutional turmoil of the Weimar Republic through which he had lived and worked as a practising lawyer and law teacher (see also Kirchheimer and Neumann, 1987).His work was concerned, in part, with exploring the changing social and political contexts in which the Rule of Law ideal, variously interpreted in different nations but with a certain common core of meaning, was invoked. For Neumann, it was important to emphasize in legal theory the emergence of a distinctively modern form of society such as that of Germany of the 1920s but exemplified in important aspects by advanced western industrial nations in generalin which corporate organization of life had acquired important new forms. In this kind of society, which we might