ABSTRACT
One of Durkheim’s most important contributions to the sociology of law was to consider criminal and civil law sanctions together, and within this framework to consider the nexus between restitution as a legal sanction and societies characterized by contractual relations. His observations about the increasing mildness of criminal justice may be challenged in this era of punitiveness. This has been the basis for much ‘refutation’ of Durkheim’s thesis concerning the decrease in retributive sanctions in the modern era. Yet we should also consider that in keeping with his overall proposition, criminal justice has been vastly overshadowed in its reach by civil law, and civil law usually is associated with compensation rather thanpunishment. In otherwords, relatively speaking the hypothesis could still be entertained that restitutive sanctions have become dominant in modernity.
