Approaches to the Study of Law as a Social Phenomenon: Legal History

• Author: Kunal M. Parker
• Pages: 56-70

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction: “Inside” and “Outside” Approaches to Law

In 1986, the prominent legal historian and socio‐legal scholar Lawrence Friedman

characterized the law‐and‐society (hereinafter “socio‐legal”) approach to the study

of law as follows:

The law and society movement is the scholarly enterprise that explains or describes

legal phenomena in social terms. To put it another way, it is the scholarly enterprise

that examines the relationships between two types of social phenomena: those conven-

tionally classified as “legal” and those that are classified as nonlegal. “Law and society

movement” is a rather awkward term. But there is no other obvious collective label to

describe the efforts of sociologists of law, anthropologists of law, political scientists

who study judicial behavior, historians who explore the role of nineteenth‐century

lawyers, psychologists who ask why juries behave as they do, and so on. What they

share is a general commitment to approach law with a vision and with methods that

come from outside the discipline itself; and they share a commitment to explain legal

phenomena … in terms of their social setting. (Friedman 1986: 763; emphasis added)

In this rendering, the socio‐legal umbrella covers a range of different disciplinary

approaches: those of sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and

history. What ties these different disciplinary approaches together is that they all

come to law from the “outside.” They seek, as Friedman puts it, to “explain legal

phenomena … in terms of their social setting.”

According to Friedman, the socio‐legal approach to law dates from the late

nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century writings of Henry Maine and Max Weber.

It rests upon “two rather modern ideas. The first is that legal systems are essentially

Approaches to the Study of Law

as a Social Phenomenon

Legal History

Kunal M. Parker

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