Sociology of Law. Apropos Moll's Translation of Eugen Ehrlich's Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts

Abstract

HE publication of an English translation of Eugen Ehrlich's Sociology of Law is an event of importance. For years, Ehrlich has exerted a considerable influence upon American jurisprudence. With and through Roscoe Pound, he is among the founders of modern American sociological jurisprudence and among the precursors of its offspring, the realist school. As a matter of fact, his influence has been greater in America than in the countries of his German mother-tongue. This man, who was born and who spent all his life in the old Austrian Empire, was an American at heart, an individualist and pragmatist, a believer in freedom and the free forces of society. He saw the task of his life in combating government by bureaucracy, which was so characteristic of the old Hapsburg monarchy. This political aim permeates his writings and colors his principal book, the Sociology of Law. Ehrlich did not have the gift of his greater contemporary, Max Weber-the gift of detaching himself from ethical and political bias in scientific research. He who undertakes to deal scientifically with "law" must be aware that this word has a multiplicity of meanings. For a judge, at least in our present civilization, law means that body, or, perhaps better, that system of norms, according to which he has to decide the litigations which are brought before him. Norms are contents of the human mind. They exist, but their existence is not, like that of physical objects, in the physical world but, like that of other contents of the mind, in the world of meanings. The norms of law exist in the same sense in which a poem, a symphony, or a simple proposition exists. Norms can be and have been made the subject matter of a "science." Norms for judicial decisions have been made the subject matter of what is usually called the "science of law," which is primarily a classificatory science. Its first aim is to help the mind grasp its objects, the norms for decision, by grouping and classifying them in the same way in which descriptive botany creates order in the mass of its objects of observation, the plants. Such a classificatory science takes the legal norms as it finds them; it does not ask whence they come and what ends they serve, nor does it judge them good or bad.