The nature of legal sociology

Abstract

Centuries, whether in cricket or chronology, are arbitrary divisions, but we are conditioned by conventions, and I find it convenient to describe the nineteenth century as giving birth to sociological jurisprudence and the twentieth century to legal sociology. A case can be made out for regarding 1900 as a turning point in the graph of legal study in the common law world. A few years earlier Holmes had expressed the conclusions of his reflections on legal education in addresses to his own Law School at Cambridge and to the rival Law School at Boston, which had been established some years earlier as a protest against Harvard's adoption of the case method.