Title: Global Approaches in the Sociology of Law: Problems and Challenges
Abstract: The study of global aspects of law and legal institutions with a socio-legal frame of reference and with sociological methods looks overambitious and unmanageable. Scarce resources of our discipline and the marginal position of legal sociologists in the world of big business limit all efforts from their beginning. This explains why empirically little has been done so far and few internationally composed research teams have been successful. Theoretically, sociology of law tends to concentrate on municipal law and eventually to generalize national legal phenomena (legalization, informalization, materialization, decentralization, and so on) without taking global legal interaction between states, between firms, between individuals, or the legal activity of international organizations as an object of analysis. The law of the world society does not appear in our textbooks and is left to highly sophisticated, but sociologically uninformed discourses, among lawyers and economists. Legal sociology sometimes gives the impression that it adheres to a description of the world-system as lawless and spontaneous, not in Ovid's idealizing manner2 but, rather, in Hobbesian understanding.3 The hesitation in studying legal practices outside or above the nation state is unjustified, first, because they are becoming more and more important, and second, because from a theoretical, as well as from a political point of view, it seems unreasonable to know so little about them. The following brief remarks point to some peculiarities which have to be taken into account while entering this new field.4
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 14
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