Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study

Abstract

In our highly centralized political system, with its advanced technology and communications apparatus, it is tempting to think that legal innovation can effect social change. Roscoe Pound perceived the law as a tool for social engineering (1965: 247–252). Some version of this idea is the current rationale for most legislation. Underlying the social engineering view is the assumption that social arrangements are susceptible to conscious human control, and that the instrument by means of which this control is to be achieved is the law. In such formulations “the law” is a short term for a very complex aggregation of principles, norms, ideas, rules, practices, and the activities of agencies of legislation, administration, adjudication and enforcement, backed by political power and legitimacy. The complex “law,” thus condensed into one term, is abstracted from the social context in which it exists, and is spoken of as if it were an entity capable of controlling that context. But the contrary can also be persuasively argued: that “it is society that controls law and not the reverse …” (Cochrane, 1971: 93–4). This semantic morass is partly the result of the multiplicity of referents of the terms “law” and “society.” But both ways of describing the state of affairs have the same implication for the sociological study of law. Law and the social context in which it operates must be inspected together. As Selznick has said, there is no longer any need “to argue the general interdependence of law and society” (1959: 115). Yet although everyone acknowledges that the enforceable rules stated and restated in legal institutions, in legislatures, courts and administrative agencies, also have a place in ordinary social life (Bohannan, 1965), that normal locus is where they are least studied. (See, for example, the emphasis on the study of official behavior in the recent Chambliss and Seidman, 1971, and on dispute settlement in much of the recent anthropological literature, cf., Moore, 1969. A significant exception is the emphasis on “law-in-society” in Friedman and Macaulay, 1969.)