However, unlike conventional legal theory, this volume seeks to provide an answer in terms of a general social theory: a methodology that answers this question in a manner applicable not only to law, but also to all the other complex and highly differentiated systems within modern society, such as politics, the economy, religion, the media, and education. This truly sociological approach offers profound insights into the relationships between law and all of these other social systems.

Modern systems theory provides a new method for the analysis of society through an examination of the structures of its communications. In this volume, Niklas Luhmann, the theory's leading exponent, explores its implications for our understanding of law. Luhmann argues that current thinking about how law operates within a modern society is seriously deficient. He lays out the theoretical and methodological tools that, he argues, can advance our understanding of contemporary society and in particular of the identity, performance, and function of the legal system within that society. In systems theory, society is its communications: they are its empirical reality; the items that can be observed and studied. Systems theory identifies how communications operate within a physical world and how different sub-systems of communication operate alongside each other. In this volume, Luhmann uses systems theory to address a question central to legal theory: what differentiates law from other social practices? However, unlike conventional legal theory this volume seeks to provide an answer in terms of a general social theory: a methodology that answers the question in a manner applicable not only to law, but also to all the other complex and highly differentiated systems within modern society, such as politics, the economy, religion, the media, and education. This sociological approach offers profound insights into the relationships between law and other social systems.

This book proposes the study of norms as a method of explaining human choice and behaviour by introducing a new scientific perspective. The science of norms may here be broadly understood as a social science which includes elements from both the behavioural and legal sciences. It is given that a science of norms is not normative in the sense of prescribing what is right or wrong in various situations. Compared with legal science, sociology of law has an interest in the operational side of legal rules and regulation. This book develops a synthesizing social science approach to better understand societal development in the wake of the increasingly significant digital technology. The underlying idea is that norms as expectations today are not primarily related to social expectations emanating from human interactions but come from systems that mankind has created for fulfilling its needs. Today the economy, via the market, and technology via digitization, generate stronger and more frequent expectations than the social system. By expanding the sociological understanding of norms, the book makes comparisons between different parts of society possible and creates a more holistic understanding of contemporary society. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers in the areas of sociology of law, legal theory, philosophy of law, sociology and social psychology.

One of the great ironies in contemporary sociology of law is that despite Talcott Parsons’s enormously influential role as “the midwife of modern sociology,” coupled with his three decades of focused and sustained analysis of the legal system’s location in a total and complex society, it is nothing short of appalling that his particular social systems approach to law has been largely neglected. Indeed, although Parsons made only cursory mention of law in some of his best-known works, he extensively discussed the role of the legal system in no less than five important papers and two somewhat lengthy book reviews. What is more, in the two slim paperbacks where Parsons applies his cybernetic systems theory in explaining the progression from premodern to modern societies, he considers law to be an essential element in the analysis of just about every society under consideration: ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamian empires; China, India, and the Islamic empires; the Roman empire; Israel and Greece; medieval Western Christendom; the United States. This volume, the first of its kind, is the most complete articulation of Parsons’s treatment of the U.S. legal system’s nature and function during the late-twentieth century. In addition to a lengthy Introduction by the editor, the book consists of 26 readings, taken from the full range of Parsons’s books and papers, which, in toto, render a detailed analytical roadmap that can today guide much of our sociological thinking concerning such contemporary social issues related to law as citizenship, trust, and governmentality. More than this, Parsons’s writings on the courts and the legal profession—both of which he believed to constitute the core of an integrative U.S. citizenry—can inform policy-makers’ decisions concerning such controversial issues as immigration, civil rights, and legal ethics.

Niklas Luhmann is recognised as a major social theorist, and his treatise on the sociology of law is a classic text. For Luhmann, law provides the framework of the state, lawyers are the main human resource for the state, and legal theory provides the most suitable base from which to theorize on the nature of society. He explores the concept of law in the light of a general theory of social systems, showing the important part law plays in resolving fundamental problems a society may face. He then goes on to discuss in detail how modern 'positive' – as opposed to ‘natural’ – law comes to fulfil this function. The work as a whole is not only a contribution to legal sociology, but a major work in social theory. With a revised translation, and a new introduction by Martin Albrow.

Germany's most prominent social thinker here sets out a contribution to sociology that aims to rework our understanding of meaning and communication. He links social theory to recent theoretical developments in scientific disciplines.