The Sociology Of Law As Science

Donald Black founds the pure sociology, aiming to distinguish sociology from psychology and make sociology a dependent science. Law is the first social fact that Black pays attention to. Pure sociology of law is an important part of pure sociology. Black attempts to found the sociology of law that is comparable with natural science. In order to realize the goal of science, Black makes great efforts in methodology. He not only drives out value judgment from study, but also removes people from the study. What this essay wants to do is digging the connotation of the specific methodology from the theory of pure sociology of law and making the peculiarity clearly by comparison with Berkeley school and Glendon Schubert.The first part discusses the source, the connotation, the goal and the whole strategy of the methodology, aiming to define the methodology. The methodology of pure sociology of law studies the behavior of law as an independent variable, and views other social factors as variables. Then, it predicts and explains the movement track of law by investigating the relationships between law and other social factors. Shortly, it uses the social space structure to predict and explain the variation of law.The second part mainly expounds the feature of anti-prescriptive of the methodology. We can find out this outstanding feature mainly from the argument between Black and Berkeley school. This methodology is contrary to prescriptive research method and is antiprescriptive. The anti-prescriptive feature means that investigators should not consider whether the law is good or not and whether the law has a good effect on society and they should just observe and describe the legal facts. In fact, one of the reason why pure sociology of law is pure is that the methodology is anti-prescriptive.The third part mainly emphasizes the feature of the removal of people by comparing the methodologies between Black and Schubert. The removal of people means that we don’t explain behaviors on basis of people, but view behaviors as social action and explain it by the social space structure. By removing people, the behavior of law is viewed as the behavior of law itself, not the behavior of people. Compared to Schubert, Black’s pattern is simpler and can easily get conclusions that are regularly.The last part is the comment on the methodology. On one side, the methodology drives out the value judgment and makes quantitative research of law, which superiors over the traditional sociology of law that is represented by Roscoe Pound. On the other side, the methodology has some defects because it goes over the limitation in driving out value judgment and quantitative research.