HOW TO CLASSIFY LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN?

A conventional manner of opening an academic discussion about sociology of law often consists in re-proposing a well-known distinction between “the sociology of law of sociologists” and “the sociology of law of jurists.” This distinction is a cornerstone in the methodological writings of Renato Treves, for example, who was one of the pioneers of the renaissance of this discipline after World War II; according to Treves, this distinction has solid roots in the different cultural origins, as well as in the diverse methodological choices, of the scholars belonging to the fields of either sociology or law. On the one side, he said that one finds such sociologists as Saint-Simon or Marx, Comte or Durkheim, all builders of complex systems of social thought. On the other, one encounters those jurists, such as Duguit, Pound, Holmes, or Ehrlich, who took an antiformalist stance as opposed to the traditional juristic method. The former aimed at a “macro-sociology” that would describe how the legal system works within the whole social system, whereas the latter aimed at a “micro-sociology,” in that they looked at the actual life of legal institutions and observed how nonlegal relations between social actors affected those institutions. Echoing Weber and Kelsen, Treves argued that sociology of law was indisputably part of sociology, not of jurisprudence, but its object (i.e., law) was so peculiar, technically and conceptually, that only well-trained jurists could really grasp it.