Recruitment, Training, and Colleagueship

The different patterns of recruitment into law and into sociology and the different experiences of students and practitioners in both milieus are critical factors bearing on the relation between the two fields.

I cannot here delineate the immense variety of academic climates but will confine my comparisons to the leading law schools and graduate schools, respectively, and even within this group to a small minority of "national" schools. Non-lawyer readers should realize that the differences among law schools. As legal education at the state university level improves and becomes more professional (with law professors increasingly taking graduate work in law at Harvard or Columbia), there is a pull towards "nationalization," which is also reflected in the upgrading of the law reviews. But the parochial pull in the other direction remains powerful, tied up as it is with the social mobility of disadvantaged groups, with the power of the local bar over bar examinations and admissions, and with the parochialism built into state decisions and courthouse folkways.

Sociology is not now prepared to embrace the legal order within its own categories in terms sufficiently detailed and concrete to shed new illumination. There is not only a certain intellectual impenetrability about the law, reflecting and resulting from the achievements of generations of jurists; there is an even more important factual impenetrability resulting from the sheer overwhelming and opaque bulk of data that must be mastered to link the empirical with the interpretive or the ideal-typical. And in the law, and even in its manifold branches, there is nothing so lucid, so condensed, so truly theoretical, as classical price theory in economics.