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This chapter provides an overview of Max Weber's ideal-typical developmental stages of the law and of the legal process. These stages include charismatic revelation by law prophets; empirical lawmaking and lawfinding by legal honoratiores; imposition of law by the secular imperium and theocratic power; and specialist administration of justice by legally educated jurists, on the basis of scholarly and formally logical education. Here it is a question of developments which ultimately proceed in the West in the direction of rational law, if not always in a linear way, and in which Weber particularly emphasizes, if not overstates, the ‘role’ of logic. For one thing, the development of rational law can have both a material and a formal character; for another, the stage of highest rationality, where Weber's ideal-typical ‘system’ of law is to be found, has, it must be admitted, never actually been reached in history. Moreover, it is important to remember that Weber ‘did not want to write legal history’ in his ‘Sociology of Law’. Rather, his discussion of legal history always has to be read in the light of his cognitive interest, so that ‘when integrated into a sociological or theoretical system of the law, historical detail will always be a little different to what it was before’.

This chapter discusses Max Weber's aims in the ‘Sociology of Law’. Before exploring in detail Weber's ‘Sociology of Law’, its essential assumptions and conclusions, as well as its conceptual apparatus, it is necessary to outline briefly its two opening sections. In the first section, established areas of the law are treated in brief, such as public law, private law, criminal law, procedural law, and substantive law. In the second section, the most important forms/categories of subjective law are presented in overview, including the classical civil rights and liberties. Weber also provides an overview of contract and the development of freedom of contract. For all their heterogeneity, Weber's remarks in his ‘Sociology of Law’ can be brought together into a historically grounded ‘theory’ of the rationalization of the law and its developmental conditions. This theory of the rationalization of the law has various basic ‘building blocks’. First and foremost, it requires a standard measure for the level of rationalization that has been reached. In a process of rationalization, ideal-typical stages of development are required. Weber also pays particular attention to two basic types of legal training or legal teaching: first, the ‘craft’ approach in the sense of the ‘empirically’ driven training of lawyers; and second, university education organized in a theoretical and academic manner.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Max Weber's works. Taking a comparative approach that spans legal systems both inside and outside Western societal formations, Weber pursues above all the developmental conditions which ultimately led to the rational form of law in the West, conceiving this development as a process of rationalization. Before using Weber's Rechtssoziologie (Sociology of Law)—or, following the new edition of the text in the Max Weber complete works, the Entwicklungsbedingungen des Rechts (Developmental Conditions of the Law)—as the basis for a detailed consideration of the process of legal rationalization, it is necessary to explore what Weber understood by the law and the legal system and how he defined these terms. It is also important to clarify his distinction between juristic and sociological conceptions of law and validity. The chapter then considers the date when Weber is presumed to have written his texts. The precise identification and collation of groups of texts shed light not only on Weber's methods, but also on the history of his oeuvre.

A provocative account of police internal affairs investigations by a leading legal sociologist. Such investigations concern accusations of wrongdoing made by civilians against police officers. By deploying analytical resources drawn from Latour’s work, it becomes quite possible to make such ordinary administrative procedures reveal something essential about the nature of state violence, what counts as legitimate authority, and how law fits into the modern architecture of power. What entities, Moreau de Bellaing asks, must be enlisted, and what relations must be established between them, in order to produce a ‘good judgment’ in these inquiries into alleged police misconduct? Having followed the police investigators in their work for several months, the author is in a position to tell us. Confronting the ‘enigma’ of a severe disproportionateness between the frequency of reports of illegitimate violence and the frequency of the imposition of sanctions for such misconduct, Moreau de Bellaing notes that the compiled data themselves give no hint of the qualitative details of any particular case: as Garfinkel showed long ago, statistical reports reveal, at most, the management techniques of the organisation that prepared the reports. Thus we must plunge into the disciplinary records to extract the phases of investigation and to assemble a logic of the case grounded not in numerical abstractions but in the ‘torturous progression’ of concrete transformations, the interplay of leads, dead ends, ulterior motives, defensive strategies and proliferating uncertainties, and the circulation of value-objects required for the generation of an acceptable conclusion warranting closure of the disciplinary file. Moreau de Bellaing’s conclusion is stark and sobering: the establishment of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of police violence has nothing to do with the magnitude of force applied, as civilians would expect, but only with the successful capture, by the investigators, of the many moving pieces composing the relational situation in which any quantum of force was applied in the first place.