In this report on civil justice and the poor we seek to examine issues relevant to the sociology of law. We have studied law and poverty because this area seems to us most likely to call into question conventional assumptions about the structure, conditions and consequences of legal administration. Here, we believe, the actual operation of the legal system is most likely to deviate from received notions; and at this stage of inquiry gross deviations may be most useful in stimulating research issues and perspectives. We have emphasized the civil instead of the criminal side because sociologists have given it so little attention.

I shall comment here on the theoretical framework Professor J. H. Skolnick suggests for studies in the sociology of law and the adequacy of the bibliography in his Social Problems article “The Sociology of Law in America: Overview and Trends.” While I welcome Skolnick's emphasis on theory and the “larger philosophical issues,” I think his theoretical orientation would unnecessarily constrict social studies of law.

We should all be indebted to Professor Auerbach for having broadened our horizons with the addition of numerous citations. I should like to reassure him that they were not excluded because, as he suggests, I might have “thought none of them had any value for the kind of theory . . . the sociologist of law ought to elaborate.” Many of them are doubtless “relevant” but, as I pointed out early in the article, I omitted all manner of “relevant” literature. I did not regard it as my responsibility to develop a comprehensive bibliography of “relevant” material, but rather to indicate some of the central theoretical concerns and research interests of the developing field of the sociology of law.

A legal impact study represents an attempt to ascertain how a particular law affects the conduct and attitudes of those individuals, groups or other relevant units located in jurisdictions where that law is in force. By its very nature such a study involves one essential comparison; the comparison between actual behavior patterns in jurisdictions having the law in question and the behavior patterns which would have existed in those same jurisdictions had the law in question never been enacted. Since this comparison is one which by definition cannot actually be made, the problem for the legal impact theorist is how to estimate best what the behavior patterns would have been in a certain jurisdiction had the law in question never existed there. The legislator or court seeking to determine the actual or probable effects of a law faces a similar problem.

As any science, natural or social, goes through various stages of development, practitioners find that past conceputalizations and tools need revamping or new applications. This is in the scheme of scientific things; it is essential for progress in science. It is necessary for developing that body of knowledge and those observations and measurement techniques comprising the sum and substance of the sciences. But one question remains: when will this occur — sooner or later?