Russia

A Russian school of sociology of law appeared in the late nineteenth century. Law professors Sergei [Page 1334]Muromtsev (1850–1910), Maksim Kovalevsky (1851–1916), and Nikolai Korkunov (1853–1904) drew attention to the social aspects of law in their university lectures and publications, including textbooks. Large-scale studies of legal reforms by Aleksandr Bobrishchev-Pushkin (1851–1903) resulted in the publication of his Empirical Laws of the Activities of the Russian Jury Trial (1896).

Many legal scholars of Russian origin contributed to sociological thinking in other parts of the world. Lev Petrazhitskiy, in his Russian works of 1910 and 1911, considered law as a psychic phenomenon, which he analyzed in terms of legal emotions and intuitive conscience. He set “intuitive law” opposite “positive law” and argued that intuitive law determined the interpretation ...