Loading field map
The central question that animates the law and society subfield is deceptively simple: what is law when it is studied as a social phenomenon? For much of the twentieth century, legal scholars treated law as a self-contained system of rules, best understood through doctrinal analysis. The law and society tradition emerged from a conviction that this picture was radically incomplete. Law, its proponents argued, is shaped by social forces, produces social consequences, and is itself a site of contestation. But how to study law in society—and what kind of society law helps create—has been the subject of intense debate. The frameworks that follow are not a parade of settled schools but a series of arguments, each responding to the blind spots of its predecessors.
The first major break with legal formalism came from Sociological Jurisprudence, a framework associated primarily with Roscoe Pound in the early twentieth century. Pound argued that law should be understood as a tool for social engineering. Instead of focusing on abstract legal principles, he urged scholars to examine "law in action"—the actual effects of legal rules on social life. Sociological Jurisprudence treated law as an instrument for balancing competing social interests, and it opened the door to empirical inquiry into how courts and legislatures operated in practice.
Legal Realism, which flourished in the 1920s through the 1940s, radicalized this impulse. Where Pound had seen law as a relatively orderly instrument of social adjustment, the Realists—led by figures such as Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank—insisted that legal decision-making was far more indeterminate. They focused on the behavior of judges, arguing that legal rules alone could not predict outcomes; what mattered was how judges responded to facts, their own biases, and the pressures of the case. Legal Realism shared Sociological Jurisprudence's hostility to formalism, but it was more skeptical about law's capacity for neutral social engineering. The Realists pushed the subfield toward a harder-edged empiricism, one that would later influence both empirical legal studies and critical approaches to law.
By the 1950s, a new framework sought to give the study of law a more systematic sociological foundation. Structural Functionalism, drawing on the work of Talcott Parsons, treated society as an integrated system of institutions, each performing functions necessary for social stability. Law, in this view, was the mechanism that maintained social order by resolving conflicts and reinforcing shared norms. Structural Functionalism offered a grand theory of law's role in society, but it came at a cost: it emphasized consensus and equilibrium, downplaying power, inequality, and social change. For a generation of scholars, this framework provided a powerful vocabulary for describing how law worked—but it also set the stage for a sharp reaction.
The most direct assault on Structural Functionalism came from Critical Legal Studies (CLS) , which emerged in the late 1970s. CLS scholars rejected the functionalist image of law as a neutral, consensus-building institution. Instead, they argued that law was a tool of domination, serving to legitimize the existing distribution of power and wealth. Drawing on Marxist theory and continental philosophy, CLS treated legal doctrine as inherently contradictory and indeterminate. The framework's practitioners set out to "trash" the idea that law had any autonomous logic, exposing it as a mask for class power. CLS was a deliberately political movement, and its practitioners saw their work as part of a broader struggle for social transformation. The framework's influence peaked in the 1980s, but its critique of law's role in perpetuating inequality left a lasting mark on the subfield.
Even as CLS was challenging functionalism from the left, a different kind of challenge was emerging from empirical researchers who wanted to study law from the ground up. Dispute Processing, which took shape in the 1970s, shifted attention away from formal legal institutions and toward the ways ordinary people experienced and handled grievances. Scholars in this tradition studied how disputes emerged, how they were transformed, and how they were resolved—often outside the courtroom entirely. Dispute Processing revealed that most conflicts never reached a lawyer, let alone a judge, and that the decision to "go to law" was shaped by social networks, cultural norms, and access to resources.
Legal Mobilization Theory, which developed around the same time, asked a related but distinct question: when and why do people use law as a tool for collective action? Building on the work of scholars like Stuart Scheingold, this framework examined how social movements and interest groups deploy legal strategies to achieve political goals. Legal Mobilization Theory shared Dispute Processing's interest in everyday legal experience, but it focused more on organized, strategic efforts to invoke law. Together, these two frameworks pushed the subfield to take seriously the agency of ordinary people and the role of law in social movements.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, the critical impulse that CLS had unleashed began to diversify. Legal Pluralism challenged the assumption that law is synonymous with state law. Drawing on anthropological studies of colonial and post-colonial societies, legal pluralists argued that multiple normative orders—customary law, religious law, community norms—coexist and interact within any social field. This framework decentered the state and opened the door to studying law in contexts where state authority was weak or contested. Legal Pluralism coexisted with CLS but broadened the critique: power was not only exercised through state law but also through the very definition of what counts as law.
Feminist Legal Theory emerged in part from dissatisfaction with CLS's near-exclusive focus on class. Feminist scholars argued that law also perpetuated gender hierarchy, and they analyzed how legal doctrines—from contract law to criminal law—reflected and reinforced patriarchal assumptions. Feminist Legal Theory shared CLS's skepticism about legal neutrality, but it insisted that gender was a central axis of power that CLS had largely ignored. The framework developed its own distinctive methods, including consciousness-raising and attention to women's lived experiences, and it remains an active tradition that continues to shape debates about equality, violence, and reproductive rights.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) , which crystallized in the late 1980s, extended this critique to race. CRT scholars argued that CLS and mainstream legal scholarship had failed to account for the persistence of racial inequality, even after the civil rights era. Drawing on the work of Derrick Bell and others, CRT insisted that racism was not an aberration but a fundamental feature of American law and society. The framework used storytelling and narrative analysis to foreground the experiences of people of color, and it challenged liberal legalism's faith in incremental reform. CRT coexists with Feminist Legal Theory and Legal Pluralism, and together these frameworks have transformed the subfield by insisting that law cannot be understood without attention to multiple, intersecting forms of domination.
Legal Consciousness emerged in the 1980s as a methodological response to the theoretical debates that had preceded it. Instead of asking what law is or whose interests it serves, legal consciousness scholars asked how ordinary people think about and experience law in their daily lives. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation, researchers in this tradition found that people often held ambivalent or contradictory views of law—seeing it as both a source of protection and a tool of oppression. Legal Consciousness research provided a bridge between the macro-level critiques of CLS and the micro-level focus of Dispute Processing, showing how legal ideologies are reproduced and contested in everyday life.
Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) , which gained momentum in the early 2000s, represents a return to the kind of systematic, quantitative research that Legal Realism had once championed. ELS scholars use statistical methods, experiments, and large datasets to test hypotheses about how law works in practice. The framework has been especially influential in the study of judicial behavior, litigation outcomes, and the effects of legal rules on behavior. ELS is methodologically rigorous, but its critics argue that it sometimes neglects the critical questions about power and inequality that CLS and its successors raised.
New Legal Realism (NLR) , which emerged around 2005, attempts to bridge this gap. NLR draws on the legacy of the original Legal Realists but incorporates insights from later critical frameworks. It insists that empirical research must be attentive to context, power, and the perspectives of marginalized groups. NLR scholars often combine quantitative and qualitative methods, and they are explicit about the normative commitments that guide their work. In this sense, NLR represents a contemporary effort to synthesize the empirical rigor of ELS with the critical awareness of CRT, Feminist Legal Theory, and Legal Pluralism.
Today, the law and society subfield is marked by a productive pluralism. Most scholars agree that law is a social phenomenon that cannot be understood in isolation from its context. There is broad consensus that empirical research—whether qualitative or quantitative—is essential to understanding how law operates. But significant disagreements remain. One fault line concerns the role of critique: should law and society scholarship aim primarily to expose law's role in perpetuating inequality, or should it also seek to improve legal institutions through incremental reform? Another disagreement concerns method: some scholars prioritize large-scale statistical analysis, while others insist that close attention to meaning and experience is indispensable. Frameworks like Legal Pluralism, Feminist Legal Theory, and Critical Race Theory remain active and continue to push the subfield to attend to the experiences of those who have been marginalized by law. Dispute Processing and Legal Mobilization Theory inform contemporary work on access to justice, while Legal Consciousness research continues to illuminate the complex ways people navigate legal systems. The subfield's vitality lies in this ongoing dialogue—a conversation that shows no signs of reaching a final answer.