Max Weber and the Sociology of Law

Max Weber and the Sociology of Law. This article focuses on the sociology of law in the work of Max Weber, and some problems related to its reception in legal thinking. As a social and legal thinker, Weber had long been stigmatized as a representative of "bourgeois pseudo-science" in Slovakia and his original works on the sociology of law were unavailable for decades. Thus, the reception of his sociology of law suffers due to this discontinuity. An analysis of Weber's sociology of law can divide his ideas in two categories: 1. law and social statics, including social structure and related issues, 2. law and social dynamics, including actors of societal changes. This paper stresses two key problem fields in his sociology of law: 1. the reflection of extralegal factors in the content of law and 2. the formalization of the social role of participants in legal relations by means of the construction of "legal status." The author claims that focusing on these two topics, together with the concept of rationalization, can broaden our contemporary knowledge about law and society. Sociologia 2012, Vol. 44 (No. 5: 621-637)