Normativity in Legal Sociology

The field of socio-legal research has encountered three fundamental challenges over the last three decades - it has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to legal doctrine, for failing to develop a sound theoretical foundation and for not keeping pace with the effects of the increasing globalization and internationalization of law, state and society. This book examines these three challenges from a methodological standpoint. It addresses the first two by demonstrating that legal sociology has much to say about justice as a kind of social experience and has always engaged theoretically with forms of normativity, albeit on its own empirical terms rather than on legal theory's analytical terms. The book then explores the third challenge, a result of the changing nature of society, by highlighting the move from the industrial relations of early modernity to the post-industrial conditions of late modernity, an age dominated by information technology. It poses the question whether socio-legal research has sufficiently reassessed its own theoretical premises regarding the relationship between law, state and society, so as to grasp the new social and cultural forms of organization specific to the twenty-first century's global societies.

Explores issues of methodology from a doctrinal as well as from an interdisciplinary perspective

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Conflict and Competition between Law and Sociology.- Chapter 3: Social Scientific Studies of Law.- Chapter 4: Whose Experience is the Measure of Justice?.- Chapter 5: On the Paradoxes of Contextualisation.- Chapter 6: A Note on Franz Kafka's Concept of Law.- Chapter 7: The Politics of Legal Cultures.- Chapter 8: Comparative Law and Legal Cultures.- Chapter 9: A Case-Study of Non-Western Legal Systems and Cultures.- Chapter 10: The Shift to Risk Management.- Chapter 11: Norms and Normativity in Socio-Legal Research.- Chapter 12: The Changing Horizons of Law and Regulation.- Chapter 13: Law and Regulation in Late Modernity.