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Sociological Perspectives on Legal Change: The Role of the Legal Field in the Transformation of the Common Law of Industrial Accidents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Ryken Grattet
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Extract

Sociological and social historical approaches to the study of legal transformations have traditionally been marked by a focus on external “social” factors, such as industrialization, class conflict, and social movement activity, that causally determine the form and content of law (Hurst 1956; Friedman 1973; Gordon 1975; Hagan 1980; Humphries and Greenberg 1981; Chambliss and Seidman 1982; Chambliss and Zatz 1993; Kantor and Fishback 1994). More recently, interdisciplinary scholarship on law and society has criticized this view for narrowly reducing law to formal structure—organizational procedures and textual rules—and for its image of unidirectional causation running from society to law (Gordon 1984; Harrington and Yngvesson 1990). The result of this critique has been a growth in interpretive research on law emphasizing ideological analysis of law and depicting relations between law and society as constitutive (Milner 1989: 633).

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Fall 1997 , pp. 359 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1997 

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