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.

In an era where new areas of life and new problems call for normative solutions while the plurality of values in society challenge the very basis for normative solutions, this book looks at a growing field of research on the relations between social and legal norms. New technologies and social media offer new ways to communicate about normative issues and the centrality of formal law and how normativity comes about is a question for debate. This book offers empirical and theoretical research in the field of social and legal norms and will inspire future debate and research in terms of internationalization and cross-national comparative studies. It presents a consistent picture of empirical research in different social and organizational areas and will deepen the theoretical understanding regarding the interplay between social and legal norms. Including chapters written from four different aspects of normativity, the contributors argue that normativity is a result of combinations between law in books, law in action, social norms and social practice. The book uses a variety of different international examples, ranging from Sweden, Uzbekistan, Colombia and Mexico. Primarily aimed at scholars in sociology of law, socio-legal studies, law and legal theory, the book will also interest those in sociology, political science and psychology.

This book explores the interrelation of facts and norms. How does law originate in the first place? What lies at the roots of this phenomenon? How is it preserved? And how does it come to an end? Questions like these led Georg Jellinek to speak of the “normative force of the factual” in the early 20th century, emphasizing the human tendency to infer rules from recurring events, and to perceive a certain practice not only as a fact but as a norm; a norm which not only allows us to distinguish regularity from irregularity, but at the same time, to treat deviances as transgressions. Today, Jellinek’s concept still provides astonishing insights on the dichotomy of “is” and “ought to be”, the emergence of the normative, the efficacy and the defeasibility of (legal) norms, and the distinct character of what legal theorists refer to as “normativity”. It leads us back to early legal history, it connects anthropology and legal theory, and it demonstrates the interdependence of law and the social sciences. In short: it invites us to fundamentally reassess the interrelation of facts and norms from various perspectives. The contributing authors to this volume have accepted that invitation.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Social Ontology, Normativity, and Philosophy of Law conference, which took place on May 30–31, 2019 at the University of Glasgow. At the invitation of the Social Ontology Research Group, a panel of prominent scholars shed light on normativity from the perspective of social ontology and the philosophy of law.

This book proposes the study of norms as a method of explaining human choice and behaviour by introducing a new scientific perspective. The science of norms may here be broadly understood as a social science which includes elements from both the behavioural and legal sciences. It is given that a science of norms is not normative in the sense of prescribing what is right or wrong in various situations. Compared with legal science, sociology of law has an interest in the operational side of legal rules and regulation. This book develops a synthesizing social science approach to better understand societal development in the wake of the increasingly significant digital technology. The underlying idea is that norms as expectations today are not primarily related to social expectations emanating from human interactions but come from systems that mankind has created for fulfilling its needs. Today the economy, via the market, and technology via digitization, generate stronger and more frequent expectations than the social system. By expanding the sociological understanding of norms, the book makes comparisons between different parts of society possible and creates a more holistic understanding of contemporary society. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers in the areas of sociology of law, legal theory, philosophy of law, sociology and social psychology.

The first extended study of Bruno Latour’s legal theory, this book presents a critical reconstruction of the whole of Latour’s oeuvre to date, from Laboratory Life to An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. Based on the powerful insights into normative effects that actor-network theory makes possible, the book advances a new theory of legal normativity and the force of law, rethinking Latour’s work on technology, the image, and referential scientific inscriptions, among others, and placing them within the ambit of legality. The book also captures and deepens the contrast between the modern legal institution and the value of law as a mode of existence, and provides a fulsome theoretical account of legal veridiction. Throughout, Latour’s thought is put into dialogue with important progenitors and adversaries as well as historical and contemporary strands of legal and political philosophy. But the thread of legality is not confined to Latour's reflections on the making of law; rather, it cuts through the whole of his highly diverse body of work. The empire of mononaturalism augured by modern philosophies of science is thoroughly juridical; as such, the actor-network theory that promises to undo that empire by freeing the value of the sciences from its epistemological clutches is unthinkable without the device of the trial and the descriptive semiotics of normativity that sustain ANT. The democratization of the sciences and the vibrancy of ecologized politics that become possible once the bifurcation of nature into essential primary and disposable secondary qualities is disabled, and once the ‘modern Constitution’ is called into doubt, also have important legal dimensions that have gone largely unexamined. Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks remedies this and other omissions, evaluating Latour’s thought about law while carrying it in striking new directions. This book introduces legal scholars and students to the thought of the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour, whilst also presenting a critical analysis of his work in and around law. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to those researching in Law, Philosophy, and Sociology.

It gives me great pleasure to offer this foreword to the present work of my admired friend and respected colleague Ota Weinberger. Apart from the essays of his which were published in our joint work An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism in 1986, relatively little of Wein berger's work is available in English. This is the more to be regretted, since his is work of particular interest to jurists of the English-speaking world both in view of its origins and in respect of its content As to its origins, Weinberger war reared as a student of the Pure Theory of Law, a theory which in its Kelsenian form has aroused very great interest and has had considerable influence among anglophoone scholars -perhaps even more than in the Germanic countries. Less well known is the fact that the Pure Theory itself divided into two schools, that of Vienna and that of Brno. It was in the Brno school of Frantisek Weyr that Weinberger's legal theory found its early formation, and perhaps from that early influence one can trace his continuing insistence on the dual character of legal norms -both as genuinely normative and yet at the same time having real social existence.

The book investigates the role of law and legal experts in the organisational dynamics of a population, demonstrating that law is a stable practice among those who (in virtue of the special knowledge they master) are called upon to select the ‘normative facts’ of a population, i.e. the interactional standards that are proclaimed as binding for the entire population by the publicly recognised legal experts (whose peremptory judgments can be only revised by peers). It proposes an integration of the recent research outcomes achieved in three different areas of study: legal positivism, legal institutionalism and legal pluralism and examines the notions of rule, coercion, institution, practice elaborated by significant theorists in the mentioned areas and illumine both their merits and flaws. Furthermore it advances a notion of law and a description of the legal field which are able to account for the nature of the legal filed as the cradle of the social order. new back cover copy: In an era characterized by a streaking global pluralism, the collapse of many state agencies, the emergence of multiple sources of law, and the rise of informal justice, the idea of a unitary and homogenous legal system seems old-fashioned. But philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists still hold many debates on the nature of law and its function, which is that law represents an institution that characterizes any orderly social context of human beings, and this book plunges into the center of those debates. Self-sufficiency of Law: A Critical-institutional Theory of Social Order investigates the role of law and legal experts in the organizational dynamics of a population. It demonstrates that law is a stable practice among those who are called upon to select the “normative facts” of a population, that is, the interactional standards that are proclaimed as binding for the entire population by the publicly recognized legal experts. To do this, the author proposes an integration of the recent research outcomes achieved in three different areas of study—legal positivism, legal institutionalism and legal pluralism. He examines the notions of rule, coercion, institution and practice elaborated on by significant theorists in these fields, highlighting both the merits and flaws and ultimately advancing a notion of law and a description of the legal field which are able to account for the nature of the legal field as the cradle of social order. This text covers key guidelines for empirical research and political activities in Western and non-Western countries.

This book provides a new and wide-ranging study of law's normativity, examining conceptual, descriptive and empirical dimensions of this perennial philosophical issue. It also contains essays concerned with, among other issues, the relationship between semantic and legal normativity; methodological concerns pertaining to understanding normativity; normativity and legal interpretation; and normativity as it pertains to transnational law. The contributors come not only from the usual Anglo-American and Western European community of legal theorists, but also from Latin American and Eastern European communities, representing a diversity of perspectives and points of view – including essays from both analytic and continental methodologies. With this range of topics, the book will appeal to scholars in transnational law, legal sociology, normative legal philosophy concerned with problems of state legitimacy and practical rationality, as well as those working in general jurisprudence. It comprises a highly important contribution to the study of law's normativity.

The question about the relation between legality and political legitimacy is both one of the basic questions of modern legal and political philosophy and one of the most important problems in theoretical sociology. This volume brings together the work of a number of internationally prominent legal theorists, political theorists, sociologists, historians and philosophers, all of whom have worked extensively on the conceptual analysis of law and power, in order to address and illuminate this central question of the social sciences. The primary objective of the book is to propose and elaborate paradigms that traverse conventional disciplinary boundaries, and to combine sociological and normative/deductive patterns of analysis in order both to capture the legitimatory foundations of modern societies and accurately to account for the transformation of the classical foundations of political legitimacy in recent decades. All chapters in the volume propose new and challenging paradigms for analyzing the legal sources of legitimate power both in the historical formation of modern societies and in the present. .