ABSTRACT
In his long and distinguished career, Roger Cotterrell has been a consistent champion of the sociological study of law. For Cotterrell, legal ideas must be interpreted sociologically: of all the methods offered in the social sciences, the sociological one is, he argues, the most able to provide the necessary insights to understand law. Historians and sociologists have generally been thought to be engaged in different, often antagonistic projects. Unlike history, sociology has long claimed to be a 'science'. The idea that sociology was the study of observable facts in the social world which could explain social structures and social systems, and why and how they held together, informed the positivist approach of many of the pioneers of the subject. In both Durkheim and Weber, the sociological method was used to help create a grand 'scientific' theory of social development, which could explain a large swath of history.
