ABSTRACT
Nicholas S. Timasheff's place in the forefront of the sociology of law was established with the publication, in 1939, of his An Introduction to the Sociology of Law. Timasheff's legal sociology emerged in direct opposition to the formalist jurisprudence prevalent, at least in the United States, from shortly after the Civil War until about the 1940s. It is noteworthy that Timasheff wrote An Introduction to the Sociology of Law while at Harvard during the late 1930s, for this was the milieu in which the sociological jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound dominated legal scholarship. Even the casual reader of An Introduction to the Sociology of Law is certain to note that Timasheff's legal theory repeatedly utilizes the notion of functional control; in other words, he relies heavily on the concept of social control in combination with a functionalist analysis of law and society.
