Brief Description

Drawing on representative works by Eugen Ehrlich, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, and Niklas Luhmann, this book maps out canonical knowledge in the sociology of law. Through a close reading and interpretation of the basic principles of the “law and society” research paradigm, it seeks to sketch out reliable signposts for understanding social transformation and shifts in rule-of-law paradigms in an era of profound change.

Using an original five-pointed-star analytical framework, the author re-situates three macro-level theories and two micro-level theories in the sociology of law, reveals the interrelationships among their core claims and key concepts, and draws a series of clear auxiliary lines for tackling the “geometric problem” of modernizing law and society in China.

Preface: The Significance of Reading Academic Classics

A once-in-a-century great transformation, a sweeping digital turn, and the global proliferation of systemic risks… These dizzying phenomena confront us head-on, suddenly thrusting to the center of our agenda the mutual relationship and interactions between law and society. The sociology of law, which specializes in this line of inquiry, has thereby been pushed under the spotlight.

Although the origins of the sociology of law can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century, it was only in the early twentieth century that it came to be established as an independent field of study. Not until after the end of World War II—alongside major advances in science and technology, especially the social sciences, and in parallel with worldwide modernization drives and social-reform programs—did research in the sociology of law truly flourish. It gradually differentiated into specialized subfields, gave rise to diverse theoretical schools and analytical models, drew on a wide range of scientific methods and empirical techniques, and built up authoritative, international academic platforms, while also establishing a firm foothold in university ivory towers across different countries. Compared with theology, medicine, legal hermeneutics, and similar traditional professions, it can clearly be regarded as a relatively young discipline. Its historical span may not be long, yet the sociology of law has always displayed a “hundred schools contending” landscape and has generated many doctrines of broad and lasting influence, some of which have already attained universally recognized classic status.

It goes without saying that anyone seeking to gain entry into a discipline must take the classics as indispensable signposts, compasses, or magic spells that open the sesame gate. Canonical works concentrate the research paradigms, intellectual traditions, and distilled knowledge of a field; they are original and striking, provide basic principles and standards of judgment, enjoy high prestige, and exert enduring influence and exemplary power. Classics are like world maps of knowledge. Sometimes their greatness lies primarily in their richness of form, enabling them to gather diverse voices and encompass an unlimited range of content; other times the key lies in their abundant content, which can resonate with a multiplicity of forms. If we liken professional study to tasting whisky, then close reading of the classics is akin to drinking whisky neat: intense and stimulating, with a lingering aftertaste. Extensive reading of popularized derivative works, by contrast, resembles adding ice or water to whisky or mixing it into cocktails: the taste is refreshing and the drink goes down smoothly, but at times it feels somewhat thin. Some overly popularized or entertaining expositions may even mislead students into knowing only the surface and remaining intellectually shallow. In my view, beginners are better off first trying whisky neat, and only then going on to explore and discover other flavors, so as to maintain a certain level of discernment and taste. Of course, it is also acceptable to begin with relatively accessible interpretive essays or books, but at the proper moment one should still return to the source—the “proto-texts”—to trace ideas back to their roots, to savor the quintessence of the craft through close engagement with the classics themselves, and thereby to achieve a more integrated grasp of the disciplinary system and the ability to infer many things from one. In times of crisis and major transformation in particular, we need to return to the classics in order to seek strategies, pathways, and grounds of justification.

Roughly speaking, social theories of law and empirical analyses of legal phenomena can be understood as the two wings of the sociology of law. The former, mainly developed in Europe, have proposed a large number of key concepts, propositions, and enduring theoretical frameworks. The latter, mainly prevalent in the United States, deploy a range of methods derived from empirical science and systems engineering to promote fieldwork on legal phenomena, social experiments, statistical analysis, model building, and mechanism design. These two aspects are mutually reinforcing. If an elegant construction in social theory is to exert real influence on the life-world and historical processes, it must confront the problem of implementation, subject its propositions to rigorous testing, and examine the actual functioning of institutions and the effects of concrete measures. Conversely, if sophisticated empirical analysis is not to be reduced to formalist display—using complicated formulas and elaborate data calculations to derive and “prove” mere common sense—it must draw deep hypotheses from theory and use scientific methods to compare and test them against practical or experimental data. Apart from meta-theory closely connected with philosophy, many classic works themselves consciously strive to balance these two dimensions of theoretical construction and empirical analysis.

When we speak of classics in the sociology of law, our minds immediately call up some of the grand narratives and founding intellectual figures whose allure is hard to resist: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and so on. Closer to our own time, there are Bronisław Malinowski, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss, Niklas Luhmann, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Schutz, George Homans, Roscoe Pound, Suehiro Izutaro, Kawashima Takeyoshi, Wu Wenzao, Fei Xiaotong, and perhaps also Norbert Elias. To understand the theories of these canonical authors, the first task is to sketch out the relevant “maps of knowledge” and to establish the genealogy of their doctrines as well as their interconnections.

In this respect, I personally benefited greatly, in my early efforts to enter the halls of scholarship, from the access routes suggested by The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory by Don Martindale, edited and translated under the direction of the distinguished Japanese scholar Shin Mutsuhito, which presents a “genealogy of modern sociology” and an analysis of the properties and various types of sociological theory. Another indispensable reference that has been on my desk since graduate school is the Concise Dictionary of Sociology (Expanded Edition) (Yuhikaku twin-series concise dictionary), edited by Hamaijima Akira and others: it contains 3,600 entries for concepts and 600 for personal names, and seeks to establish cross-references among entries wherever possible. In effect, it functions as a retrieval system for concepts and theories and as a toolbox for doing scholarly work.

I still remember that in the early autumn of the late 1980s; while traveling in Okinawa, I happened to meet Professor Hashizume Daisaburō of the Graduate School of Social Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. When he learned that I was reading Luhmann, he remarked that Luhmann’s concept of communication and semantic view of society have close kinship with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and H. L. A. Hart’s new analytical jurisprudence. His remark was simple and to the point, but that one offhand sentence gave me a genuine sense of enlightenment.

The most important thing when reading the classics is to grasp the basic substructure of a theory, and then, through appropriate methods of comparison, recombination, and reduction, to use its original concepts and propositions as a basis for exploring new variables and new hypotheses. For example, Durkheim distinguished between “mechanical solidarity” and “organic solidarity,” and then analyzed these concepts along such dimensions as population size, population density, the complexity of social relations, the intensity of interactions, the proportion and volume of communication, the frequency and severity of disputes, the quality and quantity of production, welfare levels, the desire for knowledge, and sensibility. In effect, this amounts to transforming non-variables into general variables and thereby establishing a useful instrumental framework for concrete research in the sociology of law.

Similarly paired concepts include the sacred and the profane, the urban and the rural, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, stranger society and familiar-acquaintance society, democracy and aristocracy, capitalism and socialism, litigation and mediation, and many more. All of these lend themselves to repeated in-depth investigation by similar methods. Another well-known example is Weber’s matrix of social action types: through the combination of two pairs of antithetical concepts (egoistic vs. altruistic, intentional vs. unintentional), he derived four modalities of action—habitual, affectual, instrumental rational, and value rational. Even more influential is his ideal-type matrix for legal thought: through two pairs of antitheses (formal vs. non-formal, rational vs. non-rational) he identified four ideal-typical modes of legal reasoning—formal irrationality (judgment based on magic or oracles), substantive irrationality (judgment based on opinion or public indignation), formal rationality (judgment based on statutes and due process), and substantive rationality (judgment based on purposes or morality). Since then, many scholars have used this kind of typological technique to analyze and demarcate phenomena in various fields.

In their arguments, classic authors often penetrate beneath surface phenomena to discern causal relations among different variables and thus propose highly insightful hypotheses. For instance, Marx and Engels hypothesized that private ownership and class differentiation give rise to social contradictions and conflict; Durkheim hypothesized that greater population density increases the need for social division of labor; Weber hypothesized that the centralization of organizations, given the precondition of legitimate authority, leads to higher organizational efficiency; Simmel hypothesized that an increase in social disputes can actually promote social integration. These can all serve as objects of verification and empirical analysis, and various sub-indicators and relevant empirical data can be used to model and forecast them.

To give a concrete example: indicators for analyzing social disputes might include lawsuits, petitioning, collective incidents, strikes, demonstrations and marches, social movements, and revolutionary organizations. One could then perform quantitative analysis using measures such as the number of lawsuits per million adults, the number of strikes per million employed persons, and the number of days that riots or disturbances continue. If we appropriately synthesize these hypotheses, we may be able to generate new insights and push theoretical development further. In this sense, the classics are full of open possibilities and offer different inspirations to different people. The classics reward repeated, close study and chewing over; they truly are “ever fresh on rereading.”

For that very reason, they should be closely and actively read, not skimmed. One should not expect them to be as entertaining as telling or listening to stories. They need to be read and pondered collectively, preferably in a setting of lively, many-voiced discussion and debate, with a conscious effort to avoid remaining at the level of the superficial and shallow. For these reasons, the comprehensive introduction of seminar-style teaching and the adoption of Socratic pedagogy in universities—and especially in graduate education—are, in my view, very much needed.

Although the existing curricula and teaching plans of Chinese universities have not generally institutionalized such practices, many professors nevertheless regularly or occasionally organize seminars in which graduate students read and discuss professional literature. After returning to full-time work in China in 2009, I also began to offer a weekly seminar of this sort for my own master’s and doctoral students. Each semester, I choose a theme based on my own scholarly interests, my goals for training students, and the students’ research interests. Sometimes we closely read and explain basic classics in legal theory (such as Rawls’s Theory of Justice, Dworkin’s theory of rights, or Sunstein’s Nudge); sometimes we select representative works in a particular research area (such as governance, law, and the risk society, or theories and practices of adjudication systems); sometimes we focus on frontier literature (such as the ethics and governance of cyberspace, big data, and algorithms).

Because those cohorts of students who had previously read classics like Eugen Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law with me had all graduated and taken up positions, I restarted the seminar on classic works in the sociology of law between 2021 and 2023. After we finished going through each chapter of Ehrlich’s book, Yi Junlin, a doctoral student of another professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s jurisprudence discipline who attended the course, felt that he had benefited greatly and deeply regretted not having kept detailed notes at the time.

Given that during the COVID-19 pandemic the classes were conducted via Tencent online meetings, Junlin proposed that from then on we record each session of the classics seminar and transcribe the audio into text. He and other students would then share the work of editing and organizing these transcripts so that classmates who could not attend could still access the material, and perhaps the notes might even eventually be turned into an introductory reference book in the sociology of law. I found this proposal both reasonable and hard to refuse, and so I agreed. However, he later became exceedingly busy with legal AI development projects and could not continue to shoulder that responsibility; the work of organization and coordination thus naturally fell to my own doctoral student, Zhao Zerui.

Zerui, like Junlin, works in a very conscientious, responsible, and meticulous way, with a certain “soft and sweet” warmth of personal style. Among the doctoral students attending the classics seminar, he selected several particularly active participants to share in this task. Under this division of labor, Chen Xiyi took on the organizing of the transcripts for my lectures on Weber’s Sociology of Law; Kang Yu was responsible for the lectures on Simmel’s Sociology and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; and Zerui himself edited the transcripts for my lectures on Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Luhmann’s Sociology of Law and undertook the general editorial coordination.

My lectures on Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law were not recorded, but I had kept a summary outline for each session. By supplementing these outlines with details from memory, I could produce a complete text. In fact, I had also prepared explanatory outlines for the other reading materials, which could be cross-checked against the edited transcripts. Of course, transforming these outlines and the edited drafts into a textbook or reference work required substantial further effort: enriching the content, systematizing the material, and polishing the language to enhance readability.

This, in brief, is how Classics of Legal Sociology: Five Lectures came into being. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Junlin, Zerui, Xiyi, Kang Yu, and the other students who helped in recording, organizing, and participating in the discussions.

A brief note is in order on prior publication: parts of this book have appeared in academic journals. Specifically: “Exploring the Aims and Significance of Luhmann’s Early Legal Thought,” Journal of Beihang University (Social Sciences Edition), Vol. 36, No. 3 (2023); “An Overview of Weber’s Sociology of Law—Focusing on the Rationalization of State and Law,” Local Legislation Studies, Vol. 9, No. 6 (2024); “Visual Society and Relational Power—Rereading Foucault’s Sociology of Law in the Digital Age,” Tianfu New Theory, No. 1 (2025); “Tasting Luhmann’s Legal Systems Theory,” Legal Weekly, 6 February 2025, p. 8. All other content is published here for the first time.

The publication and distribution of this teaching reference book—intended mainly for advanced undergraduates and graduate students—owe much to the strong support and careful work of Senior Editor Gao Shan at The Commercial Press. Our acquaintance and fruitful collaboration date back to the period when I was still teaching in Japan and he had just joined Law Press as an editor. The commemorative series for the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the KoGuan School of Law at Shanghai Jiao Tong University were both planned and implemented by him. It is thanks to his professionalism and dedication that this book has both stronger readability and refined design. I would also like here to express my thanks to Senior Editor Gao and to the responsible editor of this volume.

Readers may well ask: among the many classic authors in the sociology of law, why select precisely these five as objects for close reading and exposition? Some explanation of this choice is necessary. The inclusion of Ehrlich and Weber should raise little controversy. Although the genealogy of the sociology of law can be traced back to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws—with its analysis of the relations between law and geographic environment, climate, national character, customs, and religion—and to Savigny’s German historical school, with its notions of law as an organic entity, Volksgeist, and historical jurisprudence, it was Ehrlich and Weber who truly consolidated and systematized the sociology of law as an independent discipline. The theoretical frameworks they constructed by self-consciously combining legal scholarship and sociology were completed or published in the early 1910s, almost simultaneously, and stand in sharp contrast to each other while also exhibiting a certain complementarity. Most notably, Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law is the first monograph in the world to take the sociology of law as its central theme. In this book, Ehrlich recognizes the plurality of legal norms and emphasizes “living law” continuously generated in practice; he regards social facts as decisive and thus pays particular attention to the cognitive dimension. Weber, by contrast, places more weight on the coercive force, legitimacy, and operability of state law and on the role of the legal profession in maintaining social order and safeguarding individual rights. The two take up opposite poles and are highly representative.

Selecting Simmel as a paradigmatic figure of the early sociology of law may come as a surprise to some readers, since he left no monograph in that field. I believe, however, that the “micro-revolution” in sociology that he initiated in the early twentieth century is of great importance for grasping the genesis of legal order and for institutional design at the level of individual and group behavior. Perhaps this is one reason why his ideas once exerted a profound influence on Weber’s theory, even though the two ultimately parted ways and assumed different status—mainstream versus non-mainstream. Especially noteworthy are Simmel’s concepts of “social play (games),” “circle culture,” “norms of hierarchy,” “reciprocal interaction,” and “relational forms,” as well as the operationalizable methods he proposed. These opened up new vistas for understanding the essence of the sociology of law and for empirical analysis from the perspective of interpersonal interactions and network structures; they are highly forward-looking.

Foucault’s case resembles Simmel’s in certain respects. Although his theories are a brilliant hallmark of twentieth-century movements in sociology, he never established a self-contained system of sociology of law, and he did not focus on legal issues per se. Nonetheless, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and his Collège de France lecture series (1971–1972) on “Theories and Institutions of Punishment” put forward original insights into the nature of modern power and legality. From the perspective of techniques or technologies of power, they offer an instrumental analytical framework for the sociology of law. Foucault steps outside the groove of “subjective will” and seeks to understand state order through shifting relations between culture (knowledge) and power. He emphasizes the interactions between social discourse and state domination and the micro-level workings of “small powers,” in effect creating a differential geometry of power. He further analyzes the mechanisms through which external discipline of individuals is transformed into self-discipline. Simmel and Foucault are also important because their theories offer significant clues, in one way or another, for grasping and interpreting specifically Chinese principles of order. In this sense, I regard their work as indispensable classics for anyone in China studying the sociology of law.Luhmann played a crucial role in the paradigm shift in the sociology of law from functionalism to communication. Some may feel that Habermas’s theory of communicative action and the public sphere is more closely aligned with the discursive practices of law than Luhmann’s. But Luhmann himself firmly rejected this view, and, more importantly, he elaborated a fully-fledged system of sociology of law. From Sociology of Law (1972) to Law as a Social System (1993), his theoretical paradigm shifted—from structural-functionalism to autopoietic systems theory, with a stronger emphasis on fluctuation and emergence, and on meaning, discourse, and the mutual permeation between individual and society. Yet his earlier and later theories also display a marked continuity and coherence.

Luhmann’s sociology of law proposes a coherent set of concepts and analytical frameworks: the distinction between normative expectations and cognitive expectations, the legal function of reducing social complexity, the legitimation of power through procedure, accountability mechanisms in the risk society, learning-oriented law, and law as an autopoietic system. All of these have strong heuristic value for understanding contemporary institutional innovation and legal phenomena in the digital age.

For precisely these reasons, Luhmann’s theory—which does indeed carry a certain aura of “esoteric teaching”—has become increasingly influential in today’s Chinese legal academia, especially among younger researchers. Moreover, as someone trained in law, Luhmann made penetrating contributions to legal hermeneutics and to basic legal categories such as ownership, contract, procedure, legislation, and the courts. He attached great importance to dialogue with the mainstream of the legal community, thereby broadening the reach of his thought.

To sum up: in the founding period of the sociology of law, Ehrlich and Weber each constructed a macro-level theoretical system. Ehrlich starts from society; Weber starts from the state. Ehrlich highlights pluralism; Weber stresses integration. Ehrlich focuses on the normative patterns of ordinary people’s behavior; Weber focuses on the adjudicative norms of the legal profession. Ehrlich leans toward “pure” sociology of law; Weber leans toward applied sociology of law.

In contrast to them, Simmel sought to build a micro-level theoretical system, concentrating on interactions among individuals and on how the forms of such interaction affect social structures and even state institutions. Yet Simmel also acknowledges the plurality of norms and thus shares with Ehrlich a certain underlying affinity.

In the period of maturation of the sociology of law, Foucault’s theory focuses on micro-level problems, while Luhmann’s focuses on macro-level problems; the two form an intriguing pair. Foucault uncovers the deep mechanisms of differential operations of state power; Luhmann reveals the basic traits of complex social systems. Foucault investigates how discursive genealogies and technologies of the body contribute to intensifying state domination; Luhmann investigates how normative expectations and cognitive capacities contribute to reducing social complexity. Foucault emphasizes the cultural-psychological shift from externally imposed discipline to self-discipline; Luhmann emphasizes the shift from heteropoiesis to autopoiesis through feedback mechanisms in systems.

There are also points of connection between the two, notably in discursive strategies, communication as language games, and the realization of “power expectations.” Furthermore, although both Foucault and Weber analyze power, the focal points differ: the former concentrates on traps of visibility and the normative functions of knowledge, while the latter centers on the “iron cage” of rationality and the justifications of coercion. Each has its own strengths.It is not hard to see that Simmel serves as an important intermediary among Ehrlich, Weber, Foucault, and Luhmann. He plays a role in linking past and future, while his theory overlaps, intersects, and connects with the other four in various ways. For example, both Simmel and Luhmann grapple with the problem of “behavioral expectations,” though they approach it from different angles—game behavior and network structure in Simmel, second-order observation and complexity reduction in Luhmann.In fact, among Simmel, Ehrlich, Luhmann, and Foucault, one can also find strong similarities in their shared emphasis on criss-crossing relations of interaction. Taken together, these intricate interconnections can be sketched in the form of a five-pointed star (as shown in Figure 1).

Here I attempt to locate the relationships and mutual interactions among three macro-level theories and two micro-level theories in the sociology of law. Solid lines indicate relationships of opposition-in-complementarity. These solid lines generate the five-pointed-star pattern, and the text at each vertex records the core claim or key concept of the corresponding theoretical system: formal rationality, group order, forms of interaction, techniques of power, and behavioral expectations. Dotted lines indicate relationships of mutual reinforcement. By linking the vertices with dotted lines via the notions of normative pluralism, visible networks, discursive strategies, and due process, we can connect different theories and even construct a winding corridor that leads from group order, which originally stands in opposition to formal rationality, back to formal rationality itself. This, in fact, is what I have long argued should be done when seeking and drawing auxiliary lines for solving the “geometric problem” of China’s social modernization. The underlying logic by which these indirect dotted-line paths lead to the goal is as follows: a society-centered standpoint can ultimately be reduced to a relation-centered standpoint; relations are formed and stabilized through communication, so a relation-centered standpoint necessarily leads to a discourse-centered standpoint; communicative acts grounded in discourse are the smallest units of systems, so a discourse-centered standpoint is essentially unified with a system-centered standpoint; a system-centered standpoint in turn readily points toward a state-centered standpoint via due process and communicative acts, because the behavioral expectations of systems and the formal rationality of the state are inherently attuned to each other.With the help of such a diagram and its connecting lines, we can discover the interconnections among doctrines that appear widely divergent and arrive at new impressions and understandings of the overall theoretical landscape of the sociology of law. In the chapters that follow, I use the relationships among the elements of this five-pointed star and their various linkages as a background and guiding thread, and proceed, one by one, to expound the content and genealogies of the five classic theories in the sociology of law. While I do intersperse scholarly criticism (not ideologically driven critique), my overall stance is one of inclusiveness—absorbing strengths and avoiding weaknesses.

Author Biography

Ji Weidong is a Senior Professor of Liberal Arts at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a member of the University Council, Director of the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies, and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Governance and Law. He also serves as President of the Sociology of Law Research Association of the Shanghai Law Society, President of the Computational Law Sub-Committee of the China Computer Federation, and founding editor-in-chief of the Asian Journal of Law and Society. He is co-chair of the Governing Council of the United Nations University’s Global Network on Artificial Intelligence.

He has served as a designated board member of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association, a board member of the Japan Association of the Sociology of Law, a program committee member of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto, and an editorial board member of the International Journal of the Sociology of Law. From 2008 to 2018 he was Dean of the KoGuan School of Law at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; from 1996 to 2008 he was Professor at the Faculty of Law, Kobe University in Japan; prior to that, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School in the United States. After graduating from the Department of Law at Peking University in 1983, he pursued further study in Japan and obtained a doctorate in law from Kyoto University.

His main research fields are the sociology of law, comparative law, and digital law. His principal works in Chinese include: The Construction of Legal Order (The Commercial Press); New Essays on Constitutionalism (Peking University Press); The Meaning of Legal Procedure (China Legal Publishing House); China’s Rule of Law in an Era of Great Change (Peking University Press); The Road to the Rule of Law: Social Pluralization and the System of Authority (Law Press); Judicial Reform in China (Law Press); Legal Transformation in the Age of AI (Shanghai Joint Publishing); Deliberation and the Sociology of Law (Yilin Press); The Trans-Boundary Nature of Law: Norms, Facts, and Disciplinary Cross-Fertilization (Law Press); The Order of the Metaverse: Virtual Persons, Crypto Assets, and Innovations in the Rule of Law (Shanghai People’s Publishing House); Sociology of Law (Higher Education Press); and Procedure and Deliberation: The Essence of Modern Rule of Law (Peking University Press).