The emerging narrative of law as a social phenomenon – as opposed to a legal phenomenon – raises pressing questions about what it means to choose a sociological approach to law, why the discipline must be told from a sociological perspective, and how this relatively new narrative can be told. I examine these «fundamental questions» of social law studies through a careful analysis of Roger Cotterrell`s assertion that a sociological understanding of legal ideas «responds coherently and permanently to the need to systematically and empirically reinterpret law as a social phenomenon.» In deconstructing Cotterrell`s claim, I will explain how a sociological approach provides an important analytical perspective for assessing not only how law works (successful or failed) in different social contexts, but also how law functions as a social phenomenon. Using examples from historical and contemporary research, I argue that law should be studied as on a sociological «stage» where different actors perform and experience social «actions» in the «theater» of the legal discipline. I will explain why a sociological approach to law is crucial to understanding how each «action» – each social phenomenon of law – takes place in the context of other phenomena, including globalization, transitional justice, and the development of socio-legal science itself. In the Social Sciences reading room, you will find a selection of printed sources. These include social and socio-political law journals, textbooks and reference works. Integration is at the heart of interdisciplinary research. The interdisciplinary research process is primarily about drawing lessons from relevant disciplines in relation to specific research questions and integrating these results to allow for a more complete understanding of that research question. If a scientist approaches a problem that traditionally belongs to one discipline from the perspective of another discipline, he is not conducting interdisciplinary science, but interdisciplinary research. The latter is characterized by the imperialism of the cognitive perspective of one discipline over another whose ideas have been neglected. Current legal and economic research is rooted in interdisciplinarity, as it replaces the cognitive perspective of law with the cognitive perspective of the new neoclassical institutional economics.
Legal and economic research has become a form of applied neoclassical microeconomics that reduces legal rules to instruments of economic policy. This article advocates an integrated approach to law and economics that seeks to integrate ideas from legal theory and various economic paradigms into the analysis and design of economic laws. Using philosophy of science and economic methodology, the article explains why integration is an epistemological necessity for the analysis and design of economic regulations. Integrated law and economics as a competing and complementary approach to the new neoclassical institutional law and economics would offer a distinct perspective on economic regulation. Since it opens up the possibility for lawyers to integrate ideas from legal theory, sociology, and heterodox schools of economic thought, it would allow lawyers to provide their distinctive and well-informed interdisciplinary voice, rather than acting disguised as inferior applied microeconomists. Finally, it would provide space to overcome the limitations of the new neoclassical institutional law and the economic approach to economic regulation. Further research is needed to develop integration techniques and to apply integrated law and economics to concrete legal problems. Our extensive international collection of scientific literature supports your studies in social law. We have important journals, textbooks and doctoral theses on social law traditions and criminal justice studies.
The collection includes many other areas where law, social sciences and humanities overlap. Research resources on politics, economics, law, sociology and other topics. You can search for the relationship between law and society with the collections of the British Library. We offer a wide range of employment and contextual law documents, both in print and online. Abstract: The objective of this thesis is to examine how criminal justice policy practices have emerged and persisted in light of the international victim-centred legal framework for children associated with armed groups.