ABSTRACT

The term ‘legal institution’ has a variety of meanings. This diversity arises in part from the difficulty of defining the word ‘institution’ itself; historians, sociologists and lawyers all have rather different conceptions.3 Even within the discourse of law, the term has a variety of meanings: it is often used, for example, to refer to the empirical manifestations of the law such as the courts, the police, prisons and

so on. More narrowly, the term is used to represent the sociolegal concept around which rules are attached.4 Thus, if one takes a rule such as ‘no person shall bring a vehicle into the park’, the terms ‘person’, ‘vehicle’ and possibly ‘park’ could be regarded as institutions; they are terms to which rules attach. These sociolegal conceptions can then be expanded to include such notions as the family, the state or even the consumer.5 In other words, the term ‘institution’ can represent any person or group that could be said to have ‘interests’. Equally, it can apply to ‘things’ which, although not having their own interests (save perhaps animals), can form the subject matter of an interest inasmuch as a thing is capable of attracting legal relations.6 If law is to be envisaged in terms of a series of relations flowing between elements – in effect between persons and persons and between persons and things – then the term ‘institution’ can be applied to the elements of this structure. ‘Institution’ for the purpose of this enquiry refers to those elements which can exist at one and the same time in the world of social fact and the world of law. Persons and things have a meaning, therefore, both for the sociologist and for the lawyer.