ABSTRACT
A law-and-community approach tries to offer a framework for studying law that recognises the deep embeddedness of legal ideas, practices and problems in social experience. It recognises also that social experience is very varied and must be understood in all its variety. Legal philosophy in its dominant contemporary forms is not very interested in the empirical variety of law's social settings: what we can call 'the social' – the world of social experience of which law is an aspect or field. But, equally, modem legal sociology has not devoted enough attention to studying law as legal doctrine – by which is meant here rules, principles, concepts and values and the modes of interpreting and reasoning with these that are central to juristic practice and other legal experience. In general, legal philosophy lacks serious interest in social variation. It has few resources for studying analytically differences within and between legal systems in terms that are meaningful to citizens of those systems.
