Institution and Reflection—the Weakness of Sociology of Law and the Semantics of Interdisciplinarity

Our considerations rest upon the assumption that sociology of law has developed a pattern of self-description in the form of an asymmetric relationship between law and sociology, in which the question of the reception of sociological knowledge in legal practice and jurisprudence is paramount. The various disputes between empirical and normative sciences, as will become clear below, almost invariably took this form. To this day, more than a century after the emergence of sociology of law, the identity of sociology of law has remained unclear in the sense outlined in the first chapter, not least because of its self-description that has developed over historical periods.