What does it mean to adopt a sociological perspective on law? Treating law as an aspect of social life, part of a larger social environment, the aim is to understand that environment and law's place within it systematically and empirically. The papers in these two volumes should suggest something of the variety of these sociological perspectives. They have been developed in a huge literature which contains its share of classic writings. But what counts as classic is complex. Classic status has something to do with expressing a shared intellectual culture, fixing a sense of research traditions, identifying a field of enquiry, defining its outlook and its criteria of relevance, and doing these things in a specially striking way. The first volume covers ""Classical Foundations"" and consists of papers about the classics of legal sociology in this sense. The papers in the second volume have been chosen for their focus on broad current questions of theory and method. They ask how the study of law in society should be approached and how ""the legal"" and ""the social"" must be understood in general terms.
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