On Lawrence Freedman on Law & society

Legal Theory - Law and Society:  
Discussions of law are often divided between two very different perspectives -- what has been called the "external" and "internal" points of view. Prominent Law and Society scholars adopt a similar distinction when they call for an "outside" instead of an "inside" perspective on law. Most law schools (especially during the first year) concentrate on teaching an "inside" perspective, an internal - doctrinal framework as the model for "thinking like a lawyer." 
This internal - doctrinal perspective has some similarity to the "legal formalism" and "conceptualism" that Progressives and Legal Realists had been denouncing since the turn of the century. One of the most important characteristics of the formalism of late nineteenth century Classical Legal Thought was the way in which it represented its closed, internalistic point of view as "neutral, natural and necessary." The Law and Society movement arose as an extension of Legal Realism’s effort to criticize the dominantly internalistic point of view in Classical Legal Thought for having produced a "heaven of legal concepts" unrelated to the real world. 

The Law and Society perspective, like much of Legal Realism, treats law not as a closed system with an internal logic all its own but as the product of various external influences, like power, history and social, economic, and cultural influences. When Holmes proclaimed that "the life of law has not been logic; it has been experience," he was attacking an exclusively internalistic perspective that produced false certainty by confusing legal reasoning with mathematical or geometrical reasoning. 
Another influence on the Law and Society movement was the Sociological Jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound. Pound had also delivered a powerful critique of late-nineteenth century classical legal thought for having lost touch with society’s needs. Pound distinguished the "law in books" from the "law in action", and followed Holmes in deploring the increasing separation of the two.
After Holmes, this was the second intellectual seed from which the twentieth century Law and Society movement was spawned. It became the basis for Pound’s own "sociological jurisprudence," which, in turn, laid the foundation for studying why there has often existed a substantial "lag" or "gap" between social change and legal change . The Brandeis Brief is the most famous application of Pound’s ideas to the actual practice of legal argument . Brandeis and Justice Benjamin Cardozo were the foremost judicial proponents of Pound’s ideas.  Here we should note the convergence between the anthropologists highlighting "cultural lag" and the Progressive followers of sociological jurisprudence who sought to explain "legal lag," e.g., why law had lost touch with life -- why, for example, law had often failed to respond to the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society .The idea of "legal lag" figures prominently in the opinions both in Brown v. Board of Education and the assisted suicide cases.
Finally, Law and Society scholars were influenced by the Realists’ reconceptualization of legal rights . Legal Realists emphasized that the way to determine in practice whether a legal right exists is by studying what remedies the law actually allows. In contract law, for example, the Realists shifted the focus to different theories of damages (e.g., reliance vs. expectancy damages) ₅.

For Lawrence Friedman "The law and society movement is the scholarly enterprise that explains or describes legal phenomena in social terms." The work of Law and Society falls into a few broad classes: KEEP READING