The Behavior of Law

Donald Black

3.48 · Rating details · 56 ratings · 1 review

This book contains a number of propositions about the variation of law across social space. The purpose of these propositions is to predict and explain this variation, and so to contribute to a scientific theory of law. Theory of this kind has practical applications, and also applications to the study of other social life

Get A Copy

Paperback, 10 pages

Published May 28th 1980 by Academic Press (first published January 1st 1976)

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Behavior of Law, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about The Behavior of Law

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

Showing 1-1

Average rating 3.48 ·

Rating details

· 56 ratings · 1 review

Sort order

Start your review of The Behavior of Law

Feb 17, 2019 Bill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

This book builds on and surpasses Durkheim and Weber in constructing a pure social theory of law, with implications of a pure sociology for every other facet of social life. That Donald Black does this in about 147 pages is testimony to the clarity, conciseness, and logical rigor of his thought. It is surprisingly easy to read and amazing that he is able to illustrate and back his arguments with evidence from such a wide range of historical, anthropological and other social research.

The book rai This book builds on and surpasses Durkheim and Weber in constructing a pure social theory of law, with implications of a pure sociology for every other facet of social life. That Donald Black does this in about 147 pages is testimony to the clarity, conciseness, and logical rigor of his thought. It is surprisingly easy to read and amazing that he is able to illustrate and back his arguments with evidence from such a wide range of historical, anthropological and other social research.

The book raises all kinds of issues that need to be addressed in depth – and he has spawned a literature which seems quite well known in sociology but – at least in my experience – is unknown in economics. I think all social scientists today, including economists, should grapple with this book and its implications. I'll just mention a few of them here.

First, even more than Durkheim, he insists on treating social facts as social facts, and not as some confluence of individual or subgroup behaviors. In this, the work aligns more closely with modern complexity theory which would treat social phenomena as emergent properties – not aggregations. I see this as a direct challenge to social theorists like Elster (methodological individualism). But for the field I know best – economics – it exposes the simplistic theorizing done in macroeconomic (and some microeconomic) modelling. It seems to me that mainstream macroeconomics has pushed aside theorists who address macroeconomic phenomena as emergent properties (e.g., think of the ways the paradox of thrift has been driven to the margins), in favor of those who rely on characterizing "representative" consumers and producers.

To give a taste of this, here's an example of a social fact when he hypothesizes that: "Law varies inversely with other social control." He then tests this inverse relationship along numerous dimensions. Family members are less likely to sue another family member or report them to the police than they are with respect to those outside their family. In societies where family control of its members is weaker, the tendency to resort to the law is greater than in societies where family control of its members is stronger. The same logic applies to organizations (think corporations) or through time in the same society.

Second, each chapter details how this theory of social laws provides a contrasting but equally powerful explanatory system for behaviors which are more frequently explained as outcomes of individual psychology, rational choice, or subgroup cultures. In Black's framing of social phenomena, it isn't the culture or psychology of deviants which makes them deviant. Instead, he poses a theory in which deviance is created by the way law names, isolates and punishes individuals based on their social location (which he defines explicitly and thoroughly). It situates the "problem" of deviance in the exercise of social power rather than individual or subgroup behavior. The risk of the latter approaches occurs when it slips into 'blaming the victim' or excusing the deviant due to contextual determination. By extracting social theory from either of these pitfalls, Black is giving us a very powerful new way to look at deviance. Any social science which concentrates on individuals and subgroup cultures should keep this in mind as a corrective for interpreting their results and developing their research agendas. Today's behavioral economics is incredibly rich and fruitful, but would do well to consider these implications for its own progress.

Third, in the interest of creating a social science, Black has proposed a series of testable hypotheses which require eliciting information about inequities, power, and exploitation but which at the same time do not rely on any value judgments. The theory does not eliminate, obviate or ignore values. Indeed, Black's observations and references to historical and anthropological accounts of inequity and the exercise of power are essential to his hypotheses of how law behaves. But it does generate a space for inquiry which distinguishes between positive and normative claims in a way that I would not have thought possible before reading this book.

Black admits at one point that he is a "child of the sixties", mostly in terms of his delight in fresh thinking and creativity. I think this is true for the books strengths as well as its flaws. If Black were writing this book today, there are two ways I suspect it would differ. First, though he openly and regularly recounts the facts of discrimination and subjugation of women, too many of his illustrative examples betray themselves as stuck in the past by his use of pronouns. That could be easily remedied in a revised version.

The second way it might differ is in the final chapter where he speculates on the future directions of society. He lays out a plausible argument, projecting from the past, that increased intercommunication among peoples leads to greater interdependence, homogenization of language, and interchangeability which, in turn, could lead to a social condition with less law than in today. In an age with resurgent populist and fascist movements, in which people ingeniously invent artificial divisions and assign importance to insignificant differences between groups so as to gain power and exploit others, the implicit trajectory described by Black seems less likely and certainly less inevitable than it might have in 1976. Addressing this particular aspect of the book probably requires another book.

Obviously, this had a big impact on me. It strengthened some ways of thinking, challenged others, and now I've got a whole new literature that I have to read – the work his book has inspired. ...more

flag Like · see review