Asymmetric Reflection Theories: Sociology’s Farewell to Law

So far, we have examined the structures of early interdisciplinary models in German-speaking sociology of law on the conceptual basis of a reflection-theoretical research approach, which laid the foundations of all later developments. Legal autonomy and practice discourses, it became clear, could not be integrated at the end of the nineteenth century and thus gave room for the newly emerging sociology. This emerged as an independent discipline, partly due to the motive of autonomization, i.e., a reflective-theoretical distance to jurisprudence, in which interdisciplinary concepts were established simultaneously with the emergence of sociology, according to which the relationships of sociology to legal science are of an instrumental, serving nature.