ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a major set of constraining institutions, practices and knowledges in order to describe the crude benefits that sociology has yielded. Law is a major sector of social control. In part this status of law rests upon the plausibility with which it has itself prohibited, by argument, its own description and criticism. It is not the intention here to enter the unresolvable argument about whether sociologists should engage in sociology for or sociology of law. At any rate it has been the academic repository of lawyer's theory and more lawyers have now come to realize that its theoretical underdevelopment may help to explain the very character of law, while jurisprudence as taught to lawyers comes to act as the camouflage for legal peculiarity. Sociology and especially social theory is more likely to run down anyone who interferes with the steering and notably those whose vocationalism is the main shaper of their theory.
