College Of Wisconsin Law College

Around 1900 Max Weber defined his “scientific” approach to law, identifying the “legal rational kind” as a kind of domination, not attributable to non-public authority but to the authority of summary norms. Formal authorized rationality was his term for the key characteristic of the type of coherent and calculable law that was a precondition for modern political developments and the fashionable bureaucratic state. Weber saw this law as having developed in parallel with the growth of capitalism. Another main sociologist, Émile Durkheim, wrote in his traditional work The Division of Labour in Society that as society turns into extra complicated, the physique of civil law concerned primarily with restitution and compensation grows on the expense of felony laws and penal sanctions. Other notable early legal sociologists included Hugo Sinzheimer, Theodor Geiger, Georges Gurvitch and Leon Petrażycki in Europe, and William Graham Sumner in the U.S.…