ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at some of the implications of asking the sociology of law to move from the study of law and society’ to a focus on ‘law as communication’. It indicates how this new direction is related to those developments associated with the ‘linguistic turn’ which have made considerable inroads into the social sciences more generally. Debates within the sociology of law are themselves being shaped by the wider rise of non-positivist and anti-positivist epistemologies and methods. The older truth claims of the social sciences are challenged as attention shifts from description to narrative and from explanation to persuasion and rhetoric. The most straightforward response the sociologist can make to defend the mainstream paradigm of sociology of law is to say that it sets out deliberately to transmute legal meaning into sociological sense. The arguments examined in the chapter remind the extent to which disciplinary approaches impose as much as find the sense of what they interpret.
