Disputing in Legal and Nonlegal Contexts: Some Questions for Sociologists of Law

Abstract

There has been a timely shift in the focus of the sociology of law from an emphasis upon the characteristics, operations, and impact of the distinctively legal institutions and agents in modern societies, to an exploration of a more complex set of interrelationships between those institutions and agents and other social phenomena. Kidder (1975: 385ff) outlined the significance of this shift in focus for students of litigation. The Civil Litigation Research Project is itself an embodiment of the change. The early products of the Project which are presented in this issue of the Review are a testimony to the importance of the change. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an empirical research project in the sociology of law which could be of more theoretical significance and at the same time offer so many practical policy implications. By the same token, the articles contained in the Review provide the opportunity for appreciating some of the difficulties of, and dilemmas in, producing theoretically integrated and methodologically satisfactory studies in the sociology of law with the new focus. This is not to direct criticism particularly at the Project or at the authors of the articles in this issue of the Review. Rather, it is to point to a more general set of difficulties and dilemmas facing many who are currently striving to produce an empirically based sociology of law which attempts to place law in its more general social context.