College Of Wisconsin Law School
Around 1900 Max Weber outlined his “scientific” approach to law, identifying the “authorized rational type” as a type of domination, not attributable to non-public authority however to the authority of abstract norms. Formal authorized rationality was his time period for the necessary thing characteristic of the type of coherent and calculable law that was a precondition for contemporary political developments and the modern 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 becomes more advanced, the physique of civil law concerned primarily with restitution and compensation grows at the expense of criminal 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 …