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The Concept of Laws in Social Science: A Critique and Notes on an Expanded View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2024

Malcolm M. Feeley
Malcolm M. Feeley*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the problem of law and social control. Indicative of this interest, a rekindling of an earlier tradition, is the founding of the Law and Society Association and its journal the Law & Society Review, the growth of course offerings both in law schools and social science departments, and the emergence of a rapidly growing body of literature. Research interests in this area, often captured by such terms as impact, compliance, legal effectiveness, and law and social change, have diverged from the traditional preoccupation with the development and meaning of formal legal doctrine and from the more recent behavioral concerns with judicial decisionmaking, to address the broader questions of the effects of law on society at large. While varying in breadth, depth, and precise focus, most of this research treats law as an independent variable and its consequences as the dependent variables, the events caused by the law. In the language of systems theory, the formal legal rules are the “policy outputs” while changes—of whatever scope—are the “policy outcomes.” Although these studies vary from one-shot case histories to projects involving multiple controls and multiple time series analyses, they all tend to conform to this general design.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Summer 1976 , pp. 497 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1974 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association.

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