Abstract
This is a book of readings about law, legal systems, and legal institutions. But it is a book with a particular slant. The readings primarily approach that system from an outside rather than an inside perspective. The inside perspective focuses on legal rules and procedures the way that lawyers and judges usually see them—from within the legal system, so to speak—and it usually accepts them more or less at face value. This introduction will try to explain what we mean by the outside perspective. It will also give a brief account of the history and present status of outside approaches to law.
This article was original published as chapter 1 in Elizabeth Mertz, Lawrence M. Friedman, and Stewart Macaulay, Law in Action: A Socio-Legal Reader, New York NY: Foundation Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission of West Academic.
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Notes
- 1.
Felice J. Levine, “‘His’ and ‘Her’ Story; The Life and Future of the Law and Society Movement,” 18 Florida State University Law Review 69, 86 (1990).
- 2.
An Invitation to Law and Social Science 402 (1986).
- 3.
There have been some attempts to offer such generalizations. For example, Donald Black, The Behavior of Law (1976) offers a number of propositions. For a critical analysis of this work, see Gloria T. Lessan and Joseph F. Sheley, “Does Law Behave? A Macrolevel Test of Black’s Propositions on Change in Law,” 70 Social Forces 655 (1992).
- 4.
Stewart Macaulay, “Law and the Behavioral Sciences: Is There Any There There?” 6 Law and Policy 249 (1984).
- 5.
See Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans 6–13 (1966).
- 6.
Another classical figure worth mention is Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922), whose fame rests on the concept of “living law.” Ehrlich was one of the first jurists seriously interested in the rules people followed in their everyday lives as opposed to the rules “in the books.”
- 7.
One notable example was Bronislaw Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926). Another classic of legal anthropology, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence (1941), deserves special mention because it was a rare collaboration between a law professor (Karl Llewellyn) and a social scientist (E. Adamson Hoebel, was an anthropologist). See John M. Conley & William M. O’Barr, “A Classic in Spite of Itself: The Cheyenne Way and the Case Method in Legal Anthropology,” 29 Law & Social Inquiry 179 (2004).
- 8.
On the history of the law and society movement and the Association, see Bryant Garth and Joyce Sterling, “From Legal Realism to Law and Society: Reshaping Law for the Last Stages of the Activist State,” 32 Law and Society Review 409 (1998).
- 9.
See, e.g., J. Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (1950); J. Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth–Century United States (1956). See, for an assessment of Hurst’s work, the collection of essays in 18 Law and History Review, No. 1 (Spring 2000).
- 10.
See, for example, Richard Lempert and Joseph Sanders, An Invitation to Law and Social Science: Desert, Disputes, and Distribution (1986); Lawrence M. Friedman, The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (1975); Roger Cotterrell, The Sociology of Law: An Introduction (2d ed. 1992); Donald Black, Sociological Justice (1989); Reza Banakar, Merging Law and Sociology: Beyond the Dichotomies in Socio–Legal Research (2003).
- 11.
Stewart Macaulay, “Law and the Behavioral Sciences: Is There Any There There?” 6 Law & Policy 149, 152–55 (1984). Frank Munger, “Mapping Law and Society,” in Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research 21, 42–55 (Austin Sarat et al. eds., 1998), looked at Macaulay’s seven propositions and reported that fourteen years after he wrote, “our vision of contemporary law and society field are remarkably consistent with the earlier empirical results summarized by Macaulay… .”
- 12.
See, for example, Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey, “The Pull of the Policy Audience,” 10 Law & Policy 97 (1988); David M. Trubek, “Where the Action Is: Critical Legal Studies and Empiricism,” 36 Stanford Law Review 575 (1984).
- 13.
Richard Abel, “Redirecting Social Studies of Law,” 14 Law & Society Review 805 (1980).
- 14.
See Richard A. Posner, “The Sociology of the Sociology of Law: A View from Economics,” 2 European Journal of Law & Economics 265 (1995).
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Macaulay, S., Friedman, L.M., Mertz, E. (2007). Law in Action: Introduction. In: Campbell, D. (eds) Stewart Macaulay: Selected Works. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 133. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33930-2_12
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