Toward a Social Theory of Law: An Essay on the Study of Law and Development

Abstract

Law is a practical science.It does not ordinarily dwell on fundamental questions about the social, political, and economic functions of the legal order.Satisfied with implicit working assumptions about these matters, legal thought moves rapidly to more tractable questions.But when law's solutions to social problems fail to satisfy, it becomes necessary to examine the basic theory from which they derive.'This is such an era.In a time when men speak casually of a crisis of law, and ask "is law dead?" 2 it is clear that law's role in society has become problematic.Such an age demands a social theory of law.It is now necessary to frame explicit and concise questions on the relationship between law and social life, and to answer these questions by disciplined inquiry.Since the implicit, a priori conclusions about the role of law are no longer valid, we must turn to systematic efforts to understand the relationships among the legal, social, economic, and political orders.In any such effort, comparative research and crosscultural generalization will play a major role.This essay examines one area in which such research has begun, the field of "law and develop-

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