Law: The Socio-Legal Perspective

The sociolegal perspective on law portrays law as dynamically intertwined with society, politics, markets, science and technology, culture, and other social institutions. In this view, law is seen as a set of socially institutionalized norms of varying degrees of formality, ranging from statutes and judicial decisions at the formal end of the spectrum to socially institutionalized norms and cultural understandings that become embedded in everyday life at the informal end of the spectrum. Law is envisioned as deeply embedded in society rather than as autonomous in relation to the citizens and organizations that it is designed to regulate. The sociolegal perspective tends to emphasize three broad dimensions along which law matters to social life: regulatory, procedural, and constitutive.