ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns law in the Emile Durkheimian tradition: with Durkheim's approach to law and some ambiguities and limitations of this approach. What follows is part of an ongoing consideration of this subject, centred on the way that Durkheim's ideas were adapted to serve the purposes of professional jurists who collaborated with him in producing the Annee sociologique. Several members of Durkheim's Annee team had legal qualifications, but only two, Paul Huvelin and Emmanuel Levy, were actually professors of law. Both Levy and Huvelin were sympathetic to Durkheim's sociology and saw its powerful relevance for legal studies. The chapter considers how one particular legal scholar tried to overcome these, using elements of Durkheim's thinking to develop general sociological insights about law and its history. For jurists wishing to import Durkheimian ideas into their legal scholarship a main problem has been how to find a significant, well-defined place for law in general picture of modern society which Durkheim's sociology offered.
