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Norm-Making in Social Exchange: A Contract Law Model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2025

Richard Lempert
Richard Lempert*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan School of Law
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Extract

In recent years sociologists have become increasingly aware of and interested in legal environments and the characteristics of legal systems. This burgeoning interest in the law as a subject of sociological inquiry has not, however, brought with it an appreciation of the possibility that legal skills or knowledge may elucidate questions of interest to students of social systems generally. Law is arguably relevant to many sociological issues which make normative arrangements problematic. This is because a legal code represents a formalized (and often idealized) statement of those norms which are considerd basic in a Particular society. It was the genius of Emile Durkheim (1964) to recognize that the quality of legal remedies in a system could provide a good operational indicator of the way in which that society sought to answer the Hobbesean question of maintaining order. The Division of Labor in Society (1964) draws heavily on this insight.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Fall 1972 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1972.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank the following individuals for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Max Heirich, John Jackson, T. M. Newcomb, Albert J. Reiss, Theodore St. Antoine, and Stanton Wheeler.

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