The Social Protection Floor (SPF)[23] is the first level of protection in a national social protection system. It is a set of fundamental social rights deriving from human rights treaties, including access to basic services (such as health, education, housing, water and sanitation, and others, as defined at the national level) and social transfers in cash or in kind to ensure income security, food security, adequate nutrition and access to basic services. The 1980s were also a fruitful period for empirical sociology of law in Britain, mainly because Donald Harris deliberately wanted to create the conditions for a fruitful exchange between lawyers and sociologists at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. He was fortunate to recruit a number of young and talented social scientists, including J. Maxwell Atkinson and Robert Dingwall, who are interested in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the sociology of professions, and Doreen McBarnet, who became something of a cult figure of the left after the publication of her doctoral dissertation,[69] which promoted a particularly clear and forceful Marxist analysis of the criminal justice system. Ethnomethodology has not been mentioned in this journal until now and tends to be overlooked by many reviewers in the field because it cannot be easily reconciled with their theoretical interests. However, it can be noted that it has always offered a more radical and in-depth way of theorizing action than interactionism (although both approaches have much in common with respect to traditions that view society as a structural whole, such as Marxism or structural functionalism). During his stay at the centre, J. Maxwell Atkinson worked with Paul Drew, a sociologist at the University of York, to become the first conversational analysis study of courtroom interaction, using transcripts of coroner`s hearings in Northern Ireland.
[70] As a discipline, sociology of law has been very well received in Argentina. As a local movement of jurists stemming from the work of Carlos Cossio, South American scholars have focused on comparative law and sociological knowledge, constitutional law and society, human rights and psychosocial approaches to legal practice. [30] In South Korea and Taiwan, the government provides substantial support to public programs based on the development model, in which social protection is seen as a tool to promote economic growth. [25] Labour market interventions, which include both active and passive measures, provide protection to the poor who are able to find work. Passive programs such as unemployment insurance, income support, and changes in labour legislation alleviate the financial needs of the unemployed, but are not designed to improve their employability. [7] On the other hand, active programmes focus on directly improving access to the labour market for the unemployed. [8] Some influential approaches within the sociology of law have challenged definitions of law in relation to official (state) law (see, for example, Eugen Ehrlich`s concept of “living law” and Georges Gurvitch`s “social law”). From this perspective, law is understood to include not only the legal system and formal (or formal) legal institutions and processes, but also various informal (or unofficial) forms of nomativity and regulation generated within groups, associations and communities. Sociological studies of law are therefore not limited to analyzing how the rules or institutions of the legal system interact with social class, gender, race, religion, sexuality and other social categories. They also focus on how the internal normative orders of different groups and “communities,” such as the community of lawyers, businessmen, academics, members of political parties or members of the mafia, interact with each other.
In short, law is studied as an integral and constitutive part of social institutions, groups and communities. This approach is developed in more detail in the section on legal pluralism. [83] As a term, it refers to “relatively stable patterns of law-oriented social behaviour and attitudes” and is considered a subcategory of the concept of culture. [110] It is a relatively new term that, according to David Nelken, can be traced back to “concepts such as legal tradition or legal style, which have a much longer history in comparative law or ancient political science. It presupposes and invites us to explore the existence of systematic variations in the models of “law in books” and “law in action” and, above all, in the relationship between them. [111] Social law approaches to the study of globalization and global society often overlap with or use studies of legal cultures and legal pluralism. [119] The roots of the sociology of law go back to the work of sociologists and jurists at the turn of the century. The relationship between law and society has been examined sociologically in the seminal works of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The legal writings of these classical sociologists are fundamental to the entire sociology of law today. [10] A number of other scholars, mainly lawyers, have also used social science theories and methods to develop sociological theories of law.
These include Leon Petrazycki, Eugen Ehrlich and Georges Gurvitch. The social philosopher Jürgen Habermas contradicts Luhmann and argues that law can do a better job as a “system institution” by more faithfully representing the interests of ordinary people in the “world of life.” Another sociological theory of law and jurists is that of Pierre Bourdieu and his disciples, who conceive of law as a social field in which actors fight for cultural, symbolic and economic capital, developing the reproductive professional habitus of the lawyer. [40] In several continental European countries, empirical research on the sociology of law developed strongly from the 1960s and 1970s onwards. In Poland, the work of Adam Podgórecki and his collaborators (often influenced by Petrazykki`s ideas) is particularly noteworthy; in Sweden, empirical legal sociological research was mainly conducted by Per Stjernquist and in Norway by Vilhelm Aubert.