Sociology of Law - Sociology of Law in Britain

Sociology of Law in Britain

Sociology of law was a small, but developing, sub-field of British sociology at the time when Campbell and Wiles wrote their review of law and society research in 1976. Unfortunately, despite its initial promise, it has remained a small field. Very few empirical sociological studies are published each year. Nevertheless, there have been some excellent studies, representing a variety of sociological traditions. The two most popular approaches during the 1960s and 1970s were interactionism and Marxism.

Symbolic Interactionism and Marxism

Interactionism had become popular in America in the 1950s and 1960s as a politically radical alternative to structural-functionalism. Instead of viewing society as a system regulating and controlling the actions of individuals, interactionists argued that sociology should address what people were doing in particular situations, and how they understood their own actions. The sociology of deviance, which included topics such as crime, homosexuality, and mental illness, became the focus for these theoretical debates. Functionalists had portrayed crime as a problem to be managed by the legal system. Labeling theorists, by contrast, focused on the process of law-making and enforcement: how crime was constructed as a problem. A number of British sociologists, and some researchers in law schools, have drawn on these ideas in writing about law and crime.

The most influential sociological approach during this period was, however, Marxism—which claimed to offer a scientific and comprehensive understanding of society as a whole in the same way as structural-functionalism, although with the emphasis on the struggle between different groups for material advantage, rather than value-consensus. This approach caught the imagination of many people with left-wing political views in law schools, but it also generated some interesting empirical studies. These included historical studies about how particular statutes were used to advance the interests of dominant economic groups, and also Pat Carlen's memorable ethnography, which combined analytic resources from Marxism and interactionism, especially the sociology of Erving Goffman, in writing about magistrates' courts.

The Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies

The 1980s were also a fruitful time for sociology of law in Britain, mainly because Donald Harris deliberately set out to create the conditions for a fruitful exchange between lawyers and sociologists at the University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. He was fortunate enough to recruit a number of young and talented social scientists, including J. Maxwell Atkinson and Robert Dingwall who were interested in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the sociology of the professions, and Doreen McBarnet who became something of a cult figure on the left after publishing her doctoral thesis, which advanced a particularly clear and vigorous Marxist analysis of the criminal justice system. Ethnomethodology has not previously been mentioned in this review, and tends to be overlooked by many reviewers in this field since it cannot easily be assimilated to their theoretical interests. One can note, however, that it has always offered a more radical and thorough-going way of theorizing action than interactionism (although the two approaches have a lot in common when compared to traditions that view society as a structural whole, like Marxism or structural-functionalism). During his time at the center, J. Maxwell Atkinson collaborated with Paul Drew, a sociologist at the University of York, in what became the first conversation analytic study of courtroom interaction, using transcripts of coroner's hearings in Northern Ireland.

Another area of interest developed at Oxford during this period was the sociology of the professions. Robert Dingwall and Philip Lewis edited what remains an interesting and theoretically diverse collection, bringing together specialists from the sociology of law and medicine. The best known study to date has, however, been published by the American scholar Richard Abel who employed ideas and concepts from functionalist, Marxist, and Weberian sociology to explain the high incomes and status that British lawyers enjoyed for most of the twentieth century.

Recent Developments

Since the 1980s, relatively few empirical studies of law and legal institutions have been conducted by British sociologists, i.e. studies which are empirical and at the same time engage with the theoretical concerns of sociology. There are, however, some exceptions. To begin with, sociology of law, along with so many areas of academic work, has been enlivened and renewed through engagement with feminism. There has been a great deal of interest in the implications of Foucault's ideas on governmentality for understanding law, and also in continental thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu. Again, one can argue that rather fewer empirical studies have been produced than one might have hoped, but a great deal of interesting work has been published.

A second exception is to be found in the works of researchers who have employed resources from ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism in studying legal settings. This type of research is clearly sociological rather than socio-legal research because it continually engages in debate with other theoretical traditions in sociology. Max Travers' doctoral thesis about the work of a firm of criminal lawyers took other sociologists, and especially Marxists, to task for not addressing or respecting how lawyers and clients understand their own actions (a standard argument used by ethnomethodologists in debates with structural traditions in the discipline). It also, however, explored issues raised by legal thinkers in their critique of structural traditions in sociology of law: the extent to which social science can address the content of legal practice.

Despite the relatively limited developments in recent empirical research, theoretical debates in sociology of law have been important in British literature during recent decades, with contributions from David Nelken exploring the problems of a comparative sociology of law and the potential of the idea of legal cultures, Roger Cotterrell seeking to develop a new view of the relations of law and community to replace what he sees as outdated 'law and society' paradigms, and several scholars examining the potential of Luhmannian systems theory and the extent to which law can be seen as an autonomous social field rather than as intimately interrelated with other aspects of the social. Also significant has been the burgeoning field of socio-legal research on regulation and government, to which British scolars have been prominent contributors.