ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that an adequate understanding of legal ideas - for lawyers, no less than for other citizens - is impossible without adopting a sociological perspective, a perspective informed by social theory. It shows what such an approach to legal study entails and how it can illuminate basic problems, familiar to legal scholars, in interpreting and analysing contemporary law and studying its effects. The book focuses on legal doctrine - rules, procedures, principles, normative concepts and values in law and the specialized modes of reasoning applied to these. It also argues, often implicitly, against disciplinarity; that is, against a strong concern with the integrity or distinctiveness of intellectual disciplines. A main problem with the concept of community is that it is often much too vague to be empirically useful in sociological inquiry or applicable in doctrinal legal analysis.
