ABSTRACT
The civil contract perspective alerts us to the fact that where law does reflect social norms, it indexes the norms of Persons inhabiting the civil domain. For Durkheim, legal or civil expectations about how people ought to behave stem from social custom and norms. In heterogeneous civil domains, the distance between laws and social norms will be greater than in homogeneous civil domains. Differences in social “operationalizing” of moral values occurs with less grand issues as well. Just as norms are articulations of people’s values in the communal domain, law is the articulation of Persons’ values or moral principles in the civil domain. Sociologists have long attended to questions about the deterrent effects of law; about the value of force or threat of force in controlling behavior. The role of law in ordering ideas is of particular interest, for ideas are important in ordering social relations.
