On Max Weber’s Sociology of Law, now known as The Developmental Conditions of the Law. A Review Essay on MWG I/22-3: Recht

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 121 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Treiber
Author(s):  
Hubert Treiber

This chapter discusses Max Weber's aims in the ‘Sociology of Law’. Before exploring in detail Weber's ‘Sociology of Law’, its essential assumptions and conclusions, as well as its conceptual apparatus, it is necessary to outline briefly its two opening sections. In the first section, established areas of the law are treated in brief, such as public law, private law, criminal law, procedural law, and substantive law. In the second section, the most important forms/categories of subjective law are presented in overview, including the classical civil rights and liberties. Weber also provides an overview of contract and the development of freedom of contract. For all their heterogeneity, Weber's remarks in his ‘Sociology of Law’ can be brought together into a historically grounded ‘theory’ of the rationalization of the law and its developmental conditions. This theory of the rationalization of the law has various basic ‘building blocks’. First and foremost, it requires a standard measure for the level of rationalization that has been reached. In a process of rationalization, ideal-typical stages of development are required. Weber also pays particular attention to two basic types of legal training or legal teaching: first, the ‘craft’ approach in the sense of the ‘empirically’ driven training of lawyers; and second, university education organized in a theoretical and academic manner.


Author(s):  
Hubert Treiber

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Max Weber's works. Taking a comparative approach that spans legal systems both inside and outside Western societal formations, Weber pursues above all the developmental conditions which ultimately led to the rational form of law in the West, conceiving this development as a process of rationalization. Before using Weber's Rechtssoziologie (Sociology of Law)—or, following the new edition of the text in the Max Weber complete works, the Entwicklungsbedingungen des Rechts (Developmental Conditions of the Law)—as the basis for a detailed consideration of the process of legal rationalization, it is necessary to explore what Weber understood by the law and the legal system and how he defined these terms. It is also important to clarify his distinction between juristic and sociological conceptions of law and validity. The chapter then considers the date when Weber is presumed to have written his texts. The precise identification and collation of groups of texts shed light not only on Weber's methods, but also on the history of his oeuvre.


Author(s):  
Hubert Treiber

More than a simple guide through a complicated text, this book serves both as an introduction and as a distillation of more than thirty years of reading and reflection on Max Weber's scholarship. It is a solid and comprehensive study of Weber and his main concepts. It also provides commentary in a manner informed both historically and sociologically. Drawing on recent research in the history of law, the book also presents and critiques the process by which the law was rationalized and which Weber divided into four ideal-typical stages of development. It contextualizes Weber's work in the light of current research, setting out to amend misinterpretations and misunderstandings that have prevailed from Weber's original texts. Ultimately, this volume is an important work in its own right and critical for any student of the sociology of law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-256
Author(s):  
Abraham Abraham

sociology of law examines why humans obey the law and why it fails to obey the law and the social factors that influence it. as a relatively new branch of sociology, the science of legal sociology was developed to explain the interrelationships of patterns of behavior and law that cannot yet be explained by other branches of social science.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Trubek ◽  
John Esser

What should we make of Susan Silbey's call for socio-legal scholarship that is both critical and empirical? Do we think the law and society movement can and should develop a critique of the legal order? Can empirical research contribute to such a critique? Does the idea of a “critical sociology of law” make any sense at all?


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 737-753
Author(s):  
Jan Klabbers

Abstract This review essay takes an in-depth look at the most recent addition to the Oppenheim family, a two-volume work on the law and practice of the United Nations, prepared by Rosalyn Higgins and a dream team composed of some of her former students. The essay not only zooms in on the merits of the work but also aims to place it in context in a changing world, wistfully noting a little nostalgia (on the side of the reviewer as well as that of the authors perhaps) for, well, the days of wine and roses.


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