law, philosophy of

Introduction

      the formulation of concepts and theories to aid in understanding the nature of law, the sources of its authority, and its role in society. In English-speaking countries the term “jurisprudence” is often used synonymously and is invariably used in reference to particular subdivisions of the field.

      To the extent that it implies some necessary link or coincidence with general philosophy, the phrase “philosophy of law” may be somewhat misleading, for philosophy of law is mostly untouched by the conflicts of different philosophical schools, and its practitioners may without incongruity draw on diverse philosophical outlooks—on Logical Positivism for some analytical problem of the structure of legal orders (law) and, simultaneously, on Existentialism for a problem of sociological jurisprudence or justice, for example—without commitment in any such instance to an entire philosophical outlook.

      Nor can one treat philosophy of law as a specialized branch of philosophy such as ethical or political philosophy, epistemology, or logic, for in philosophy of law all these branches may make contributions. Ideas that may illumine jurisprudential problems must indeed be sought not only in philosophy but in all systematic bodies of thought. Only if “philosophy” is interpreted in its least technical and broadest sense does “philosophy of law” cease to be a misnomer.

Problems of the philosophy of law

Various approaches

      For practical reasons, such as to avoid overlappings, it is convenient to organize jurisprudence into three principal branches only: analytical jurisprudence, sociological jurisprudence, and the theory of justice.

Analytical jurisprudence

      The analytical questions in jurisprudence are concerned with articulating the axioms, defining the terms, and prescribing the methods that best enable one to view the legal order (or part of it) as a self-consistent system and that maximize awareness of its logical structure. Perhaps the most rigorous solutions are those which, like that of Hans Kelsen (Kelsen, Hans), a contemporary Austrian–American legal philosopher, attempt to identify structural or relational features as being necessarily entailed in the meaning of legal norms or in lawyers' intellectual operations with them (see below Pure theory of law (law, philosophy of)). Alternatively, the basis for logical structuring may be found in some imputed attribute of law not itself inherently structural. The 19th-century English legal philosopher John Austin (Austin, John), for example, thought it an essential preliminary to his quest for a logical system in law to clarify what was involved in his assumption that law always consists of “commands.” This clarification is important, but the claim that such a clarified version of a common assumption necessarily amounts to an analytical model of law seems unwarranted.

      On more modest levels, the analyst may seek to infuse clarity and orderliness into some particular branch of a legal system or even into the applications of some particular rule. Such work shades over, on the one hand, into ordinary legal analysis and, on the other, into jurisprudential efforts to clarify the meaning of particular legal terms. Analysis of a particular word or even a particular branch of law will usually, by necessity, be particularist in the sense that it works upon legal materials found only in one particular legal system. In between particularism and universalism lie what are sometimes called comparative approaches, in which analytical jurisprudence is applied to materials drawn from more than one (but not from all) legal systems.

Sociological jurisprudence

      The sociological questions in jurisprudence are concerned with the actual effects of the law upon the complex of attitudes, behaviour, organization, environment, skills, and powers involved in the maintenance of a particular society. Conversely, sociological jurisprudence is also concerned with the effects of social phenomena on both the substantive and procedural aspects of law, as well as on the legislative, judicial, and other means of forming, operating, changing, and disrupting the legal order. The fact that men in a given time and place hold particular ideas and values, including ideals of justice, is itself a fact the relation of which to law must be studied; but the focus is sharply different from that in the study of theories of justice. Its focus is descriptive, not normative (normative ethics); it is concerned with what is or with what goes on, not with what ought to be or ought to go on.

The theory of justice

      The theory of justice is concerned with the evaluation and criticism of law in terms of the ideals or goals postulated for it. This involves the identification and articulation of the values that the legal order seeks to realize. This aspect of jurisprudence is inextricably interwoven with ethical and political philosophy, and theories of justice thus tend to parallel the full range of ethical and political philosophies.

Law, morality, and natural law

      A consideration of fundamental importance in the philosophy of law is that of the distinction between law and morality. The importance of the distinction is illustrated by the main questions to which it gives rise: (1) How far and in what sense should the law of a community seek to give effect to its morality? (2) Is there a moral duty to obey the law even when it does not embody morality, and, if so, are there any limits to this duty? (3) When a legal rule directs conduct that morality forbids, which should the citizen obey? (4) Is there ever (and, if so, when is there) a duty to overthrow an entire legal system because of its conflict with morality?

      In all these questions the word “law” refers to the specialized form of social control familiar in modern, secular, politically organized societies. The word “morality” in the four questions may, however, refer to any of the following: (1) the community's relevant factual behaviour patterns (its mores); (2) its socially approved behaviour patterns, as sanctified by some widely held rational or religious ideal, whether observed in practice or not (social morality); or (3) the moral ideals accepted by each individual as binding on himself and on others, whether or not those others agree (individual morality). All these, like law, are means of controlling human conduct by setting normative (norm) standards; and all three have a constantly changing interaction with each other, as well as with law.

      The fact that legal and moral norms vary from place to place and from one historical period to another lies in part behind a persistent theme in the philosophy of law: the search for unchanging norms that are universally valid. Clearly, the most certain way of establishing such norms would be to base them on widely observed facts, such as man's social propensities or the ubiquitous importance of kinship in social organization, which supposedly reveal something fundamental about the nature of man and his adjustment to the world. The attempt to base norms on some such category of facts has for two millennia been associated with the concept of natural law. This concept has many versions, the principal of which are outlined in the historical survey below, but the significance of the topic merits some separate preliminary discussions.

      It has always been possible to trace a mainstream of natural-law thought, flowing from Aristotle's (Aristotle) premise that the “nature” of any creature, from which obligations must be derived, is what it will be in its fullest and most perfect development. For man, this means what he is when the powers and qualities distinguishing him from other creatures, namely, his reason and his impulse to social living, are fully developed. Natural law embodies those obligations that will appear if mankind's reason and sociality are fully unfolded.

      A major difficulty presented by this attempt to develop normative standards appears to be that it is very difficult to demonstrate, let alone create a sense of obligation toward, values that are only immanent. All theories of natural law, moreover, have found it necessary to rely on what are essentially intuitions or preconceptions as to what man's true nature is. All such theories acknowledge, for instance, that the full development or fulfillment of an entity is not the same as its mere continued existence, that there may be a “warping” or “impeding” of the natural tendencies, so that what exists may then “be said to be unsound or incorrect.” Thus, mere factuality is not a sufficient source of obligation. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas, Thomas, Saint) himself, in identifying the “inclinations” from which men may learn natural law, found it necessary to order these in grades of inclination, so that those inclinations most closely related to reason and sociality take priority over those concerned (for example) with procreation and self-preservation. The criteria by which such a hierarchy is ordered must be drawn from sources other than the factual inclinations themselves. The “lower” grades (such as self-preservation) may well be based on something like instinct; but the question arises at the higher grades whether there is any comparable instinct by which men seek to find moral precepts binding all of them in common. Aquinas here appealed to synderesis, a kind of sympathetic understanding found in men, a disposition (habit) of the practical intellect inclining them to the good and murmuring against evil.

      To derive from this synderesis a universal natural law, however, it would be necessary to demonstrate some “universal conscience” of all mankind. But natural lawyers faced with the fact that men's consciences do not coincide explain that conscience may err and reason be corrupt. Invocation of synderesis is in fact helpful not as an account of how one may arrive at factually based normative standards but as an illustration of the psychological tendency of men to assert values.

Historical survey of legal theories

The ancient world

Greek thought (Greek law)

      The major contribution of Greece was a body of philosophical and cosmological ideals about justice, more apt for orators' appeals to popular assemblies than for preceptual application to day-to-day life situations.

      Early Greek cosmologies (cosmology), embedded in some of the earliest myths, had seen the individual as held within a kind of transcending harmony of the universe, emanating from the divine law ( logos) and expressed in relation to human life in the law ( nomos) of the polis, the city-state. The later Sophists (Sophist), however, who examined critically all assumptions relating to life in the city-state, pointed to the wide disparities in human law and morals and rejected the claim that this human law (nomos) necessarily reflected any universal law (logos). Taking man as “the measure of all things,” they rejected any claims of his law (nomos) to absolute value and saw law and justice and values generally as created by men's reasons, in their multitudes and generations, in all their individuated, relativistic, and historically changing dimensions.

 In the restless intellectual and political climate of 5th-century Athens, Plato was concerned to redefine the nature of justice by relating it to something far more permanent and absolute than the nomos of the city-state. He assigned “reality” to the unchanging archetypal forms—i.e., the ideas—of things rather than to the ephemeral phenomena as superficially and confusedly perceived by individual men unenlightened by philosophy. In the utopia described in the Republic, Plato defines justice in an architectonic sense: justice prevails when the state is ordered in accordance with the ideal (Idealism) forms ascertained by its philosopher-kings and is thus unrelated to the nomos of the city-state. There is no need for human law, since transcendental knowledge rules. In his later thought, however, as revealed in Politicus (the “Statesman”) and the Laws, when he is concerned to describe a more practicable but nevertheless “second best” state, Plato assigns to law a role almost as important as that of knowledge in the Republic. A famous classification of states given in Politicus is indeed based on the criterion of whether or not they are ruled by law. The law as Plato here conceived it, however, was not mere convention or the imperfect individual judgments of men but a reflection of the common human reason in its full development. To this extent the rule of law might approximate the ideal rule of knowledge envisaged in the Republic, for in the inherited law of men is crystallized that much wisdom of which they are capable.

      And yet it was difficult for Plato to find justification for such an argument in his basic philosophical position, with its emphasis on the contrast between the mere opinion of ordinary men and the transcendental knowledge of the philosopher. Aristotle, who in common with Plato held a view of nature or reality that transcended the variability of things as perceived by the senses, was, however, able more successfully to defend the validity of a law resulting from the practice of ordinary men. For Aristotle's transcendental reality is more firmly related to things as they are: it comprises that which they will become as their potentialities unfold in nature toward the end that is theirs in nature. Man (human being), in his nature, is moral, rational, and social, and his law may be judged by the extent to which it facilitates the development of these innate qualities.

      The Greek conception of natural law underwent further refinement by the Stoic (Stoicism) school of philosophy, which became active toward the end of the 4th century BC. The Stoics posited the existence of a natural law, the jus naturale, which was an emanation of the lex aeterna, the law of reason of the cosmos. The existence of an innate reason in men linked everyone with the cosmic order and subjected all to a universally valid moral law. This latter concept thoroughly infused Roman thinking, largely as a result of the influence of Stoic philosophy on Rome.

Roman thought

      Greek law scarcely survived as a system, because it never developed a class of legal specialists or abandoned its lay administrators or its popular tribunals of grotesque size. Roman law, on the other hand, developed through the efforts of expert jurisconsults (learned lawyers (lawyer)) and praetors (praetor) (magistrates) into a permanent heritage of Western society. By its adoption into works such as Cicero's De republica as well as in the work of the great jurisconsults, Stoic speculation concerning reason and nature was brought onto the level of precepts for concrete problem solving. The crude, tribal jus civile (“civil law”) of the Romans was thus transformed into a natural-law-based jus gentium (law applying to all people), a set of principles common to all nations and appropriate, therefore, for application to foreigners as well as Romans.

Hebrew thought (Hebrew literature)

      In the Talmud (Talmud and Midrash) there is an assertion that “Whatever decision of a mature scholar in the presence of his teacher will yet derive from the Law ( Torah) that was already spoken to Moses on Mt. Sinai.” In theory, this presupposed that the Oral Law must respect every jot and tittle of the revealed written law. Yet the richness, ambivalences, and silences of what was written, in relation to a changing world, still left the widest freedom to the scholarly reason of the rabbinical exegetes into whose care both the written law and the Oral Law finally came.

      The operations of the rabbinical schools and courts over many creative centuries, especially during and following the first Babylonian Exile, resembled those of the great Roman jurisconsults and the great judges of the common-law (common law) tradition. One Talmudic story tells of a doctrinal rift between the majority of a rabbinical court led by a great rabbi and a dissenting but no less great rabbi, in which the dissenter successfully summoned the authentic voice of God onto his side of the argument. To this intervention the majority of the court responded: “The law is not in heaven, the law has been handed down to us on earth from Mt. Sinai, and we no longer take notice of heavenly voices. . . .” And the story relates that, at that point, God said with a smile to Elijah the prophet, with whom he was walking: “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.” But this was an indulgent ratification, not an implacably cruel wrath such as the Greek god brought down on the head of Prometheus. Thus, even against divine intervention, the learned stood their ground, relying for the interpretation of the law on their own wisdom and reason.

The Middle Ages

Augustine (Augustine, Saint)

      St. Augustine of Hippo, in attempting to refute the pagan assertion that Christianity was responsible for the decline of Roman power, reintroduced Stoic philosophy alongside Judeo-Christian thought into the stream of modern jurisprudential speculation. He placed God's reason beside God's will as the highest source of the unchangeable, eternal, divine law binding directly on man and all other creatures. The divine law was thus accessible to both man's reason and his faith and was not, as St. Paul had largely concluded, the product of his will alone and hence not rational in terms of human as opposed to divine reason.

      At a second level, Augustine placed the no less unchangeable natural law, being the divine law as man is given the reason, heart, and soul to understand it. The third level, of temporal, or positive, law (for him, the Roman law of the Christian Roman Empire), was warranted by the eternal divine law, even though it changed from time to time and from place to place, so long as it respected the limits laid down by the divine and natural law. This rationale of secular (secularism) power, some have thought, preserved the idea of government under law through the disintegration of the ancient world, for recultivation in the revival of learning of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Scholasticism

 Aquinas, like Augustine long before, succeeded in quieting momentarily the competing claims of the will against the reason of God, the struggle between “ voluntarism” and “ Rationalism,” as the underlying basis of the eternal and natural law. Aquinas, like Augustine, gave a plausible place to both natural law and temporal (or positive) law under the eternal law. Human, or positive, law is a creation of human reason for the common good, within limits that natural law prescribes, so that even this proceeds from right reason and therefore from the eternal law. Such positive law as violated the natural and thus the eternal law “was not law” or merely was not binding “in conscience.”

      The tendency to make reason prevail over will (as in Plato's call for philosophers to be kings or the Arab Averroës' (Averroës) call for philosophers to interpret what is revealed) was challenged by a voluntarist countermovement at Paris and Oxford in the quarter of a century after Aquinas' death in 1274. A Franciscan, John Duns Scotus, insisted on the uniqueness of all beings as finally traceable to the uniqueness of God's will. All precepts, even of the divine law, depend on the single precept “Love God,” and, since not reason but will gives access to this, there is no natural law accessible to man's reason. All that can be required of human, or positive, law is that it must be “consonant” with the precept “Love God,” or with any other precept willed by God.

The Renaissance period to the 18th century

Machiavelli (Machiavelli, Niccolò)

 Machiavelli presented himself (on one interpretation, at least) as seeking to escape from both transcendent will and transcendent reason into the empirical (Empiricism), into life as it is, observed through the eyes of a worldly man whose mind is uncluttered with philosophical and theological preconceptions. He can be understood, in his own words, to be seeking “what a principality is, the variety of such States, how they are won, how they are held, how they are lost.” This conception was the more remarkable in 1513, since such an approach had then barely been promulgated for study of the physical world. It had still, indeed, to await its major manifesto in that sphere until Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning at the end of the century.

      Even on the more favourable view of Machiavelli's aim—i.e., as describing, rather than prescribing, political behaviour—it remains true that he saw this description as ancillary to the art of maintaining the state and its ruler, so that this maintenance is a kind of end in itself. The omnipotence—unrestrained by law or morality—that he both ascribes and prescribes to the prince is thus a product not so much of his scientific detachment as of his tendency to view political power as a value, as an end in itself.

Natural law and social-contract theory (social contract)

      The supremacy of the human lawgiver, as posited by Machiavelli and in their diverse ways also by the French and English political theorists Jean Bodin (Bodin, Jean) and Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas) and others, interwove in the following centuries with continued insistence by Grotius and others on the dominance of the divine reason and man's participation in it, by which he has access to the natural law.

      The Dutch political and legal philosopher Hugo Grotius (Grotius, Hugo), amid the political expediencies and anarchy of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), sought to introduce a degree of normative restraint among the monarchical rulers of the newly emerged sovereign states of Europe and to establish a basis in natural law for a rejection of raison d'état as a just cause for war, as well as for legal limits on the means and modes of violence in war. Even if the wills of sovereign states form the basis of the international order, Grotius argued, “the totality of the relations between States” is still “governed by law.” That law he found in an updated version of the Stoic (Stoicism) natural law, as naturalized into Roman law and Christian theology.

      With Grotius, as with the Stoics, the normative or moral power of the natural law derives from the fact that man's innate nature (itself part of the nature of the cosmos) and his propensities are viewed as ideal or inherently good. In Grotius' own time, however, there arose a Skepticism toward such unfounded optimism, a skepticism that underlies the thought of Hobbes.

      With Hobbes (1588–1679), as with the Greek Sophists, the nature of man is not the ideal nature of Grotius and the Stoics. It is rather man's supposed actual nature, before sociality and authority have tempered it. Man, in a state of nature, is motivated by desires and aversions and most of all by the desire to preserve his biological existence. This need for security is best met by all men vesting their rights of self-help in a sovereign, whether that sovereign be a single man or an assembly of men, and subjecting themselves to the laws of that sovereign, or “great Leviathan.”

      The reason why men must obey the law of the sovereign state, which is the only institution capable of protecting men against each other, is thus based firmly in Hobbes's conception of man's nature, albeit a very different conception from the idealist premises of earlier theories of natural law. Natural-law theorizing after Hobbes is thus divided into these two major streams.

Judicial supremacy

      By the beginning of the 17th century the idea of applying natural law as a test of the validity of the positive law (the law of the particular human jurisdiction) had passed from the province of speculative writers to courts of law. The English jurist Lord Coke (Coke, Sir Edward), in Bonham's case in 1610, was already referring to the tradition that “when an act of Parliament is against common right or reason or repugant or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it, and adjudge such act to be void.” About a century before that, an English treatise known as “St. Germain, Doctor and Student” had already presented a three-tier hierarchy of the law of God, natural law (the law of reason), and human (positive) law, obviously deriving from Augustine and Aquinas.

      In the United States in the next century, constitutional theory became highly infused with ideas of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, marked the beginning of a continuing natural-law influence on American constitutional development. The power of the judiciary to “review” legislation for consistency with a written constitution (Constitution of the United States of America) was taken in the United States to import the power to declare it void, constitutional law being analogized to natural law. Indeed, American judicial statements of 1814, 1822, and 1831 asserted the power of the judiciary to strike down statutes for violation not only of explicit constitutional restraints but also of “eternal principles of justice which no government has a right to disregard.” The analogy of constitutional and natural law did not necessarily require that the power to strike down legislation should be a judicial power: this was not so in ancient Rome, nor is it always so in modern civil-law countries. It is arguable that such a judicial repository of the power of final review is unavoidable, since the legislature cannot be expected to annul its own acts; and the executive, even if it were not a party to such acts, is scarcely equipped for the tasks of objective interpretation involved. Yet there are real difficulties of policy and principle raised by giving the judiciary the final word. A distinction must first of all be made among diverse constitutional restraints. Safeguards for such rights as free speech and assembly and access to courts, which help to assure the responsibility of rulers and to prevent the fall of democracy into tyranny or demagoguery, may well be placed in the final custody of judges. But, beyond this point, others have argued, judicial supremacy, in enforcing restraints laid down by the Founding Fathers of an earlier generation, may clearly constitute an obstacle to the implementation by the courts of a society's present convictions.

Decline of natural law

      If man is the measure of all things, as the Sophists (Sophist) taught, then a given society of men is the measure of its culture, including its moral and legal standards. In the modern period the French jurist and political philosopher Montesquieu's (Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de) De l'esprit des lois (1748) and Lettres persanes (1721) offered the thesis that a people's law and justice are determined by the particular factors and environment that operate upon them. They thus could not, as the natural-law theory of the time held, be unchanging from age to age and from people to people. The French sociologist Auguste Comte's (Comte, Auguste) Système de philosophie positive (1851–54), which set out to explain positive laws, like other social facts, by reference to verified hypotheses concerning cause and effect and interaction, was similarly antithetical to natural-law theory as it had so far developed. To Comte, metaphysical (metaphysics) concepts about such abstractions as ideal essences belonged to a past stage in man's intellectual development. And Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), the English philosopher Herbert Spencer's (Spencer, Herbert) positivism, and other related thinking of the period provided a biological model of self-development of organisms and institutions through a struggle in which survival was a function of challenge and response in the given environment. Change and adaptation, rather than constancy and inviolability, were thus at the heart of their system.

      Under the leadership of anthropologists, analyses of man's internal process of response to the exigencies of existence within a particular culture—to conscious and subconscious psychic drives and motivations—deeply affected the jurisprudential study of law and society and helped to bring natural-law thinking to a 19th-century nadir. In the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's (Malinowski, Bronisław) most mature statement on the matter, he distinguished four major meanings of the word law as important in understanding the growth of civilization. They included “laws of nature” in the scientific sense of rules governing men's conscious adaptations to the environment; rules of “efficiency” and “convenience” according to which the group lives; rules for conflict adjustment; and rules about enforcement of the last two. No conception of natural law, which had engaged earlier thinkers for two millennia and more, was included.

“Idealism” (Idealism) and justice

 Another line of thought, which was also divorced from natural-law concepts, was contained in the Idealist philosophy (transcendental idealism) of Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel). Fundamental to Kant's ethical and jurisprudential reasoning is the premise that all moral concepts have their basis wholly in a priori thought (a priori knowledge), that they can be arrived at by reason alone, without reference to experience or recourse to intuition of rules alleged immanent in experience. Man, furthermore, is a free agent whose actions are determined by aims that he is at liberty to select. From such premises Kant deduced the nature of an ideal law, in which is implicit a theory or criterion of justice. This ideal law comprises the conditions under which all members of society can enjoy the maximum freedom from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.

      But Kant's supposedly a priori concepts are in fact as transcendental as anything natural lawyers have offered. It is thus not surprising that later thinkers, such as Johann Fichte (Fichte, Johann Gottlieb), Kant's Idealist successor, had little difficulty in putting the new Kantian wine into natural-law bottles.

      The 20th century saw a fresh attempt at the Kantian (Kantianism) approach in the work of the German legal philosopher Rudolf Stammler (Stammler, Rudolf). Adopting the Kantian position that knowledge is independent of sensory experience, Stammler set out to discover pre-experiential categories, or “pure forms,” of thinking about law. Stammler arrived at a social ideal of a “community of free-willing men,” an ideal that he claimed to have universal validity because of its supposed a priori basis. Having thus arrived at a “pure” ideal of society, untainted by empirical content deriving from sense perception, he felt able to formulate equally pure principles for just law that would regulate his ideal society. Stammler's pure idea of society comprised the harmony of individual and common purposes: his pure idea of just law thus comprised those principles conducive to such harmony—the mutual respect of individuals for each other's purposes and the participation of all in the achievement of the common purposes.

      The different stream of Idealism flowing from Hegel's philosophy of history was fed into jurisprudence by Josef Kohler (Kohler, Josef), Stammler's close predecessor in that subject in the Berlin University. His work is still another effort to relate social facts and the norms of justice by exposing the immanence of values in facts—in “civilization” in Kohler's case.

      In perspective, these idealisms, despite their formal or philosophical antagonism to “rationalism” and natural-law thinking, seem to have reinforced in the age of the Industrial Revolution the individualist and libertarian trends that natural law had built up successively against medieval church and empire, the shackles of medieval social, political, and economic organization, and 18th-century despotism.

The 19th and 20th centuries

Analytical Positivism

      The early 19th century witnessed a reaction against both Kantian Idealism and iusnaturalism (natural-law theorizing). The scientific temper of the age, reflected in the practical achievements of the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, was not conducive to deductive reasoning from a priori hypotheses, which appeared an impractical method of solving the problems of complex societies. Such problems might better be approached via a thorough analysis of existing law and institutions. This new climate of opinion came to be known as Positivism.

      Among the chief meanings of Positivism in the legal-analytical sphere are the separation of law as it is and law as it ought to be, stress on the analysis of legal concepts, reliance on logical reasoning in the search for applicable law, and denial that moral judgments can be based on observation and rational proof. Anglo-Saxon analytical Positivism has directed itself mainly to the logical dissection, appraisal, and clarification of the precept element of law, ignoring the elements consisting of lawyers' traditional techniques and received ideals. By the nature of its tasks, analytical jurisprudence does not concern itself with either the facts surrounding or the consequences flowing from legal precepts or with their ethical evaluation, though particular analysts may also be interested in those matters.

      Analytical Positivism in England began with the work of the philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, Jeremy). His work influenced John Austin, the most outstanding figure in English jurisprudence, who set out to analyze the notions pervading English law. In order to delimit his subject, he defined positive law as the commands of a sovereign addressed to political inferiors and backed by threats of evil in the event of disobedience. Positive law might well be derived from moral precepts and other sources, but such precepts become law only when commanded by a sovereign.

      The analytical-Positivist attitude has continued to influence thinkers, although the particular approach of Austin is now of historical interest only. Logical analysis is clearly a tool that may be employed in many spheres of jurisprudence, and its importance thus transcends the limits of any one school. Analysis means little in itself; its value depends largely on the validity of the premises from which the argument is made and on the relevance of the subject matter that is chosen for analysis. The paramountcy for the analytical Positivist of questions of logical order and consistency represents a permissible deviation, yet still a deviation, from the wider concerns of ordinary lawyers and students of law and society generally. This is not to say that there is a necessary conflict between the requirements of justice among changing social facts and those of logical consistency of precepts. It means only that there is surely no necessary (nor indeed usual) coincidence between them.

Historical Positivism

      In discarding speculative cosmology, the a priori, and the self-evident, 19th-century historical jurisprudence opened the way for the search for the realities of law through empirical observation—for a sociodescriptive rather than a logico-analytical-Positivist jurisprudence.

      The leading figure in the historical school was the German jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny (Savigny, Friedrich Karl von), who confronted the natural-law aspiration for a universal human code with the singularity of the law of particular peoples resulting from their unique sociocultural experiences.

      For Savigny, law rests on the Volksgeist, or innate popular consciousness; law par excellence is customary law. He recognized, of course, that the details of a developed legal system do not spring from simple group intuition. With maturity, both life and law become more specialized and artificial, creating a dualism in more mature law. Part of such a system still rests directly on the popular consciousness and way of life (“the political element”); but this becomes elaborated by jurists, be they Roman jurisconsults or common-law judges, who in this respect represent the community (“the technical element”).

      Savigny's emphasis on the need of legal change to respect the continuity of the Volksgeist offers a pre-Darwinian concept of juristic evolution. The Volksgeist corresponds to modern notions of social rather than biological inheritance. Savigny's sense of the impotence of legislatures in the face of the restraints imposed by the Volksgeist foreshadows modern recognition of the social and psychological limits of effective legal action.

      The English legal historian Sir Henry Maine's (Maine, Sir Henry) dual academic concern with both English law and Roman law challenged him to explain their independent yet often parallel growths and may well have redeemed him from Savigny-like overemphasis of national uniqueness. His concern led him to a comparative historical jurisprudence seeking hypothetical “laws” of development controlling all legal systems. He saw changes in substantive law and in the machinery and modes of legal enforcement and growth as moving in pace with certain recognizable stages in social growth, from primitive, kin-organized society to the mature, complex commercial and industrial societies of Europe.

      Maine's experience in India after the publication of his Ancient Law in 1861 broadened his interests so that he embraced less well known and less developed systems, such as the Brehon, Hindu, Welsh, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and Hebrew. His breadth of interest matched the concurrent growth in anthropological study of primitive peoples.

      Maine's work shows the strong combined influence of the analogy of biological to social evolution and of the Hegelian philosophy of history. The consequent, somewhat mechanistic tenor of his interpretations resulted in his being accused by many anthropologists and legal historians of making false assumptions concerning the pattern and sequence of social development.

Economic interpretations

      Certain residues of the Marxist (Marxism) economic interpretation of history have won a central place in sociological (socialism) jurisprudence (see below Growth of the sociological school (law, philosophy of)), as indeed in most branches of social science. One such persistent trend of thought is the close interrelatedness of legal, ethical, economic, and psychological inquiries; another is the pre-eminence among these of economic factors. According to Marxist doctrine, the political and judicial systems—the state and the law (Soviet law)—represent the superstructure of society, their nature being determined by the economic base—the mode of production and exchange. The state and its repressive law are but instruments of class domination, becoming redundant under Communism, which has no need of coercion. During the transition to full Communism, they would “wither away.” There were, of course, softenings of this bold doctrine in its original authors, with admissions that the ethical or legal superstructure should not be seen as a merely passive effect; and Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) himself pressed to extremes both the passion of the original thesis and its qualifications. Lenin, indeed, saw state power as an essential weapon of the proletarian dictatorship until the movement to a full Communist society should be completed.

      The first half-century of the Soviet Union, with its steady consolidation of state power and its attendant law, has imposed the severest strains on the withering-away prediction. The general tenor of explanation is that the “law” the disappearance of which is prophesied refers only to the kind of coercive order manifest in such instrumentalities as the courts, police, and jails of capitalist countries.

      Within these sweeping theses of Marxist thinking, more modest subtheses have played a valuable part. The Socialist jurist Karl Renner (Renner, Karl), for example, in his Rechts-institute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion (1929), was concerned to show that the legal conception of ownership, formulated in early economies, had profound new effects when continued as an institution of the 19th-century economy. It then, through the law of property and contract, alienated into private hands great segments of what should be in the public domain.

      Even more notable are the German sociologist Max Weber's (Weber, Max) studies of the correlations of socioeconomic and ethicojuristic change, freed of the straitjacket of economic determinism. In these, the impact of unique factors or combinations of factors in particular civilizations is taken into account, including the existence of accepted systems of values, immediate and ultimate, which may (and in Weber's view did) have a decisive effect on the emergence of the Western capitalist system.

Sociological jurisprudence

      The historical jurisprudence of the earlier part of the 19th century became subject to the influence of the developing social sciences, which attempted to explain law in its social context. The result was the emergence of a sociological school of jurisprudence.

      The early decades of sociological jurisprudence combined 19th-century faith in progress, social evolution, rationalism, humanitarianism, and political pluralism with a sanguine belief that the Newtonian model of natural science would also hold for the social sciences. It was affected by questions of whether the social sciences are truly sciences, what their mutual boundaries are, and whether they can be integrated or somehow transcended by some subject such as sociology or anthropology.

      An outstanding figure of the early sociological school was a German, Rudolf von Jhering (Jhering, Rudolf von), who in the 1860s contributed to the intellectual stream a theory of justice predicated on a view of law as a social phenomenon. He saw law as an outcome of the struggle of men to fulfill their purposes and of the force that they marshal behind this. Another historical jurist, the German Otto von Gierke (Gierke, Otto Friedrich von), stirred a related interest with his emphasis on the importance of the inner life and activities of groups and associations as sources of binding social norms. This opened up jurisprudence to some psychological issues. Gierke's work also contributed to the later American Neorealism through its influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes (Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.), Jr., and to the theory of the “living law” of the Austrian jurist Eugen Ehrlich (Ehrlich, Eugen), in the first decade of the 20th century. Ehrlich insisted on the profuse norm-creating activities of the countless associations in which men are involved.

      At the beginning of the 20th century a great variety of psychological hypotheses were brought to bear on law. A theory of dynamic psychic drives, for example, was propounded by an American sociologist, Lester F. Ward (Ward, Lester Frank), who argued that such drives could be utilized in social planning. Freud's exploration of psychic activity on a subconscious level, as well as studies of the nonrational and the irrational in the social process by the Italian and German sociologists Vilfredo Pareto (Pareto, Vilfredo) and Max Weber, were also profoundly influential.

Revival of natural-law theories

      Iusnaturalism, in the sense of the assertion of an order of norms for human conduct transcending human will, to which the validity of positive law is subjected, has certainly experienced a 20th-century revival. The massive human delinquencies of the century, such as those of the Nazis (National Socialism), have been important in stimulating these modern natural-law yearnings. The revival, indeed, has rarely overthrown dominant Positivist positions, but it has certainly reopened some questions that Positivists have not adequately faced.

      Contributions to this re-emergence have come from varied directions, rather than from a single intellectual movement. They have often avoided explicit reference to natural law and have even expressed hostility or ridicule toward it. The German Stammler and the French jurist François Gény (Gény, François) were certainly among its pioneers. Gény's Méthode d'interprétation (1899) displayed the inescapably creative (or lawmaking) role of the judiciary even under a comprehensive code such as the Code Napoléon (Napoleonic Code). It led him to the questions of what are “the sources of law” and where does the legislator's prescription fall short. Answers to such questions must be based on the facts of each particular situation to be adjusted—the legislator cannot impose his view on the court. This line of thinking foreshadowed a variety of doctrines about “the nature of things” or “the nature of facts,” all of which shared the idea that the decisive nature of a situation has its base in the facts for which men seek governing law. The properties and circumstances of these facts themselves afford immediate guidelines for just regulation. The fact situation, if only its essence will be perceived, has the superior applicable norms immanent within it.

      In his Lehre von dem richtigen Recht (1902), Stammler sought, as described above, the a priori social principles of just law concerning respect for and participation by all members. His call for “natural law with a changing content” based on these a priori principles quickly became a 20th-century slogan.

      Even as this express reinvocation of natural law was proceeding, the French public lawyer Léon Duguit (Duguit, Léon) was expressly denouncing it. Duguit's concern was to place law and lawyers within what he saw to be the correct frame. This he found in Émile Durkheim's (Durkheim, Émile) Positivist sociology. This led him, with some paradox for a contemner of natural law, to insist that law is but “le produit spontané des faits” (“the immediate result of the facts”). The observed “facts” of social solidarity arising from economic specialization of functions generated, Duguit argued, the society's norms. Breach of these norms causes social disorder and a spontaneous movement toward readjustment. Even a supreme legislator was bound (Duguit affirmed) by this objective “rule of law,” so that his acts violating it are void, even apart from any other constitutional restraint. All this bears the clear iusnaturalist mark of the assumed immanence in observed facts of a transcending and overriding order. It pays cryptic homage to a natural law, fealty to which Duguit denied.

      The German legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch's (Radbruch, Gustav) turn toward natural law at the end of a life of great contributions to democratic legal relativism and Positivism was very different. Positivism, Radbruch argued, had encouraged German lawyers to stand by at Nazi barbarism, declaring “Gesetz ist Gesetz” (“Law is Law”). Nor was Radbruch's turn to natural law in any way cryptic. He came to declare quite openly that:

where justice is not even striven for, where equality which is the core of justice is constantly denied in the enactment of positive law, there the law is not only “unjust law” but lacks the nature of law altogether.

      The linkage with the revived natural law of the legal institutionalism of the French legal philosopher Maurice Hauriou (Hauriou, Maurice-Jean-Claude-Eugène) and the writer and historian Georges Renard is different again. As with Duguit, the linkage is not proclaimed, but no overt hostility disguised their obvious sympathy for Thomist (Thomism) positions. Theirs is a Catholic version of institutionalism (which regards social institutions such as the family or the corporation as expressing the social reality underlying the law). The natural-law assumptions are apparent in the insistence on “the principles of organization,” the “communion” of members in realizing “durable ideals,” and the placing of men's powers of organization into the service of such ideals, as essential elements of any institution. For them, as for Duguit, the principles of justice were principles of social organization, immanent and self-evident.

      It has been tempting for many to seek kinships between natural law and Existentialism, as was attempted by the German legal philosopher Werner Maihofer. Such efforts seem, however, destined to denature either Existentialism or natural law itself. Even in all their varieties, Existentialist positions approach no nearer to natural law than to assert that the traumas, anxieties, and demands of mere “existence” confront men with fateful value choices. Yet this is far short of asserting that any transcending principles of harmony may be discoverable.

      Abstract symbols such as “social solidarity,” “the principles of social organization,” or “immanence in the facts of social life” are by virtue of their ambiguity susceptible to misappropriation by absolutist governments. The same may be said of Savigny's Volksgeist notion, as witness its affinity to the racialism of Nazi law. Thus, while the modern revival of natural law has been in part a revulsion from totalitarianism, it can also be exploited to rationalize totalitarianism.

      There is another paradox also: The growth of the social sciences has invited restatement of natural-law traditions in terms of social ideals. Yet the very complexity of the social and economic orders and of their attendant sciences has placed forbidding barriers before the aspiration to base justice or other values on “objective” knowledge. Some have been tempted to hope that natural law may somehow overleap such barriers.

Pure theory of law

      In part, at least, the influence of the distinguished legal philosopher Hans Kelsen's “pure theory of law” reflects early 20th-century Skepticism about natural law and sociology, to both of which Kelsen opposed his claimed purity of method; i.e., a method free from contamination by values of any sort.

      He asserted, first, that legal theory was properly a science in the sense of an uncommitted, value-free, methodical concern with a determined object of knowledge. Second, he argued, legal theory must be isolated from psychological, sociological, and ethical matters. Third, purity of method permits the analyst to see that every legal system is in essence a hierarchy of norms in which every proposition is dependent for its validity on another proposition. The justification for describing any particular rule as law thus depends on whether there is some other proposition standing behind it, imparting to it the quality of law. This regression is continued until the Grundnorm, or “basic norm,” is arrived at. The basic norm derives its validity from the fact that it has been accepted by some sufficient minimum number of people in the community.

      Kelsen's (Kelsen, Hans) assertion that norms can spring only from other norms seems but another way of stating his rejection of the relevance of facts to values and, therefore, of iusnaturalism and sociology to his pure science of law. Yet finally it has seemed to many dubious whether the Kelsenite theory itself escaped the liaison fatal between facts and norms; for, if all legal norms must finally hang on the basic norm, then whatever it is that the basic norm hangs on must be nonlaw. And whether the basic norm hangs on “habitual obedience to determinate persons,” as the English legal philosopher John Austin in effect proposed a century before, or on “efficaciousness,” as Kelsen proposed, what it hangs on is fact rather than norm. Critics have complained that, at most points in the creation of norms in Kelsen's system, what is decisive is the intervention of acts of will of persons endowed by higher norms with norm-making authority. The determination whether such acts of will have occurred is a factual inquiry, to the decisiveness of which Kelsen's pure theory gave little weight.

Modern schools of realism (realism)

 The American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes's (Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.) description of law in 1897 as “what the courts will do in fact” and of the “real ground” of decisions as resting often in some “inarticulate major premise” rather than in expressed reasons gave 20th-century legal realism its central theme.

      Certain features are common to the “realist” jurists. They include (besides the above-mentioned concern with “the law in action”) stress on the social purposiveness of law, on the endless flux in both society and law, on the need to divorce the “is” and the “ought” for purposes of study and to question all orthodox assumptions made by lawyers, and in particular on the need to substitute more realistic working categories for current lawyers' generalities. Among the orthodoxies thus challenged, these writers tended to include the works of early sociological jurisprudence. Yet it is clear, from the present perspective, that the concerns common to the realists and the more orthodox sociological jurists were far more important than the ephemeral if bitter conflicts that at first flared up between them. The American realists in their important surviving contributions have for the most part reinforced, clarified, and elaborated a number of main insights, notably about rule uncertainty and fact uncertainty, which they shared with sociological jurisprudence.

      Scandinavian realists, while temperamentally akin to their American colleagues, were rather different in intellectual concerns. Methodologically, they invoked a somewhat gross empiricism, leading them to deny that the law could be the subject of scientific inquiry at all, since its concepts and principles are not founded on spatial and temporal data of experience. Taking lawyers' talk of the will of the sovereign very literally, they were concerned to show that there is no such will of common content and that even legislators who enact a code are merely rubber stamping what others drafted.

      The Swedish jurist Axel Hagerström (Hägerström, Axel) insisted that the idea of rules of law as commands is an idea not corresponding with facts. His disciple Karl Olivecrona added that this false idea results from the syntactical imperative form used in modern legislation. Such rules, he urged, were commands only in a depersonalized sense. He preferred to describe them as “independent imperatives.” Such “imperative statements about imaginary actions, rights, duties” may not be directed to any particular persons. Yet, even if some legal rules are directed “so to say, into the air,” others are certainly directed to particular persons. If any form of imperative notion is to be preserved, it should be one that accommodates both situations.

      Some of the problems that these writings address are rather tied to the special experience of their authors' own legal cultures. Others reach out independently toward truths already reached earlier in Anglo-American jurisprudential scholarship, especially as to the merely noetic and conceptual (rather than physical or psychological) nature of rights, duties, and liabilities.

The status of contemporary philosophy of law

      By the middle of the 20th century, serious scholars no longer argued for or against the exclusive imperium of either the analytical–logical, the justice–ethical, or the sociological approach. Whether jurisprudence is a single field in some scientific sense or whether its unity lies in the need to serve the intellectual needs of those concerned with making, applying, improving, or generally understanding law, all the above areas are included within it.

      A characteristic feature of contemporary jurisprudence is what has come to be known as “the revolt against formalism”; that is, against preoccupation with the technical and logical aspects of law. It can be traced back to Savigny's (Savigny, Friedrich Karl von) early 19th-century reaction against natural law, to Jhering's (Jhering, Rudolf von) attacks on the German Pandectists (commentators on Roman law), and to Maine (Maine, Sir Henry) and the work of the anthropologists and early sociological jurists. Its early pressure was toward broader and deeper history, toward recognition of the organic nature of the processes of cultural growth, and toward problems of social action and the value choices therein entailed.

      In the United States the legal philosopher Morton White identified five later contributing strains of thought, in cluding the pragmatism of John Dewey (Dewey, John); the economist Thorstein Veblen's (Veblen, Thorstein) institutionalism, rejecting both the abstractions of classical political economy and the fatalism of the Marxist (Marxism) interpretation of history; the revolt within jurisprudence of the American legal realists already described; and the approach to history as no mere chronicle of kings and battles but rather as a product of underlying economic forces and a guide to present and future civilizations.

      The sometimes-overhasty iconoclasms of this revolt have proved less important than its positive affirmations. It has affirmed, for example, that the evaluating activities of justice must somehow move alongside the describing activities of sociological jurisprudence, that the choices of ethics, social policy, and justice still remain to be made when all the empirics of social science are done. The central question includes not merely what are the facts but also what should be done about the facts. These affirmations reject any regression to simple amoralism, stirring new temptations to return to natural law or other intuitive absolutes.

      There are important advantages in the drive, characteristic of much contemporary social science, for overall cognition of the social and legal orders and the identification of key points for social action within them. But there are also dangers, for, especially with subject matters such as the law, systematic theory and overall cognition can rarely be of aid save in the rather long run, for which present decision makers cannot usually wait.

Growth of the sociological school

      The most eminent pioneers and champions of modern sociological jurisprudence were Roscoe Pound in the United States and Hermann Kantorowicz (Kantorowicz, Hermann) in Europe. For both, the task of sociological jurisprudence, though orientated mainly to practical administrative or legislative problems, included that of framing hypotheses (as to the limits of effective legal action, for example) on which to base general laws of the operation of law in society.

      As with the social sciences, the principal methods available to sociological jurisprudence are those of survey, statistical analysis, comparative observation, and experimentation. The controls and corrections available usually fall far short of those of the natural-science models. Much work in sociological jurisprudence has merely brought to bear upon the law relevant findings from other social sciences. But it may also generate its own findings, as it has done in relation to traffic laws, control of moneylending, credit unions, bankruptcy laws, the effect of antitrust practices or of poverty on legal rights, the theory of appellate judicial decision making, and a host of other matters. Examinations of the prehistory and aftercareers of convicted criminals and of persons on probation or parole, probings of family and environmental influences bearing on potential deviance, and attempts to identify decisive factors predictive of future deviance are among the staples of sociological jurisprudence.

      Sociological jurisprudence is confronted by the questions whether (and, if so, how and how far) it is possible through empirical methods to approach central issues of social action that involve value judgments. The fact that lawyers are necessarily involved with ideas of obligation, values, (normative ethics) and norms (norm) sharpens this confrontation. A second group of problems arises from the high level of individuality of men, groups, and societies, from the unending variety of their emotions, roles, and expectations, and from the feedback effects on human behaviour that the empirical observation and testing of that behaviour brings about.

      These problems give central importance to efforts to develop frames of social knowledge that give due place to both facts and values. Such inquiries show the great complexities of values held and their intricate and dynamic relation to the physical and cultural environments.

      The study of law in society thus shares with anthropology and other social sciences a central interest in roles and functions as basic meaningful categories and in certain mechanisms and channels whereby conduct is thought to become socially meaningful. These notions are thought to permit the analysis of complex social situations into more refined terms, such as constituent goals, tasks, expectations, and allocated rights, powers, and duties.

      As to the mechanisms or channels through which conduct becomes socially meaningful, earlier thought tended to explain social norms as built up from individual instances through group usages and mores that then crystallize in institutions such as law. Insofar as this suggests a cumulative movement or process, current thought would regard it as oversimplified. The growth of socio-ethical convictions is rather to be seen in terms of symbolic interaction between individuals. A particular society may be seen, in this light, as a collection of individuals with a culture that has been learned by symbolic communication from other individuals back through time, enabling members to gauge their behaviour to each other and to the society as a whole.

The future of sociological jurisprudence

      In his famous program of 1911–12, Pound (Pound, Roscoe) formulated a series of rather practical objectives for the movement, including making studies of the law in action, of the means of more effective legislation and law enforcement (by creation of ministries of justice, for example), of legal and judicial reasoning, of legal history in its social context, and of the role of the legal profession. An early quip against the sociological school was that it was like a great orchestra constantly tuning its instruments but never actually playing. Yet many practical tasks have been performed, and the school continued to show a gathering momentum and a widening range of concerns.

      The maladjustments and inadequacies of the law gave to early sociological jurisprudence an intensely activist drive, directed to ad hoc remedies, and a great deal of the relevant work is still of this nature. Especially since 1945, however, juristic work on the relations of law and society has come into more fruitful contact with other social sciences, leading in turn to greater stress on cognition of the social and economic orders in their complex unity. Whatever the difficulties of designs for an overall analysis of the social system, some adjustment toward them is inevitable for sociological jurisprudence. This is in part, no doubt, a result of the waning of interest in many of the kinds of ad hoc problems with which it was initially concerned. But the interest in sociological theory also results from growing awareness that some problems require to be approached on a wider basis. This has created new stirrings of the turn-of-the-century ambition that the study of law in society become a specific branch of social science, concerned with framing and testing general laws governing law as a social phenomenon.

Julius Stone

Additional Reading

Leading treatises in English include A. Ross, Om ret og retfaerdighed (1953; Eng. trans., On Law and Justice, 1958); W. Friedmann, Legal Theory, 5th ed. (1967); H. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (1945); G.W. Paton, A Text-Book of Jurisprudence, 3rd ed. by D.P. Derham (1964); R. Pound, Jurisprudence, 5 vol. (1959); J. Stone, Legal System and Lawyers' Reasonings (1964); Human Law and Human Justice (1965); Social Dimensions of Law and Justice (1966); Lev S. Jawitsch, The General Theory of Law: Social and Philosophical Problems (1981; trans. from the Russian); and Robert S. Summers, Instrumentalism and American Legal Theory (1982). Neil MacCormick, H.L.A. Hart (1981), is an analysis of the legal philosophy of the prominent jurist.Notable works on the history of philosophy of law include E. Wolf, Griechisches Rechtsdenken, 3 vol. (1950–54); A. Verdross, Abendländische Rechtsphilosophie, 2nd ed. (1963); R. Marcic, Geschichte der Rechtsphilosophie (1971); and G. Fasso, Storia della filosofia del diritto, 2 vol. (1966–68; 2nd ed., vol. 1, 1970). David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (1981), is a comprehensive survey of Hume's thought on judgment, justice, political power, and government.(Analytical jurisprudence): J. Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence (1832); H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961); W.N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions As Applied to Judicial Reasoning (1923); H. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 2nd ed. (1960; Eng. trans., Pure Theory of Law, 1967); A. Kocourek, Jural Relations, 2nd ed. (1928); I. Tammelo, Outlines of Modern Legal Logic (1969). (Ethical jurisprudence): C.K. Allen, Aspects of Justice (1958); J. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780); E. Bodenheimer, Treatise on Justice (1967); H. Kelsen, What is Justice? (1957); C. Perelman, Justice (1967); G. Radbruch, “Legal Philosophy,” in K. Wilk (ed.), The Legal Philosophies of Lask, Radbruch and Dabin, pp. 47–226 (1950).(Sociological jurisprudence, including historical jurisprudence): W. Aubert (ed.), Sociology of Law (1969); E. Ehrlich, Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts (1913; Eng. trans., Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, 1936); L.M. Friedman and A.S. Macaulay (eds.), Law and Behavioral Sciences (1969); G. Gurvitch, Sociology of Law (1942); K.N. Llewellyn, Jurisprudence (1962); H. Maine, Ancient Law (1861); F. von Savigny, Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (1830; Eng. trans., Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, 1831); E.M. Schur, Law and Society (1968); J. Stone, Law and the Social Sciences in the Second Half-Century (1966).See also Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (1980); Hannu Tapani Klami, Anti-Legalism (1980); M.A. Stewart (ed.), Law, Morality, and Rights (1983); John D. Hodson, The Ethics of Legal Coercion (1983); Anthony Allott, The Limits of Law (1980); and B.R. Krishna Iyer, Law Versus Justice (1981).

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