Lévy-Bruhl, Henri (1884–1964)

Henri Lévy-Bruhl, born in Paris, became both a professor of Roman law and a legal sociologist. As a Roman law professor (his first inclination), he taught at various French universities, including Grenoble (Switzerland), Lille, and Paris.

Lévy-Bruhl wrote more than fifteen books on topics in legal sociology, some of which were translated into English, German, and Spanish. He was heavily influenced by the work and theories of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and in this vein set forward a series of theories regarding the sources of law and the study of law. With respect to the concept of law, Lévy-Bruhl indicated that the law was a specific social phenomenon, made up of diverse types of norms. These norms had some form of objectivity in the sense that they were the product of multiple factors that one could identify.

Legal norms, therefore, entailed a certain determinism (not as rigorous as the laws governing nature, but nonetheless real), which could be the object of scientific inquiry. As such, Lévy-Bruhl advocated for the study of law as a science. He baptized this study as “juristic” science. As for methodology, he stated that juristic science must occupy the general research methods available to the social scientist, which he summed up as observation, interpretation, and comparison.

As a legal sociologist, Lévy-Bruhl conducted inquiries into a series of diverse legal fields, such as the study of crime and judicial decision making. In the latter area, he focused on the way that judges value and consider evidence in trials, aside from the positive norms that instruct judges how to carry out this task. In the area of crime, Lévy-Bruhl was convinced that traditional legal studies fell short and that one must face the topic from a sociolegal perspective. He believed that in its attitude toward crime, a social group revealed its true personality or identity. From 1950 to 1951, Lévy-Bruhl conducted extensive survey research into the topic of abuse of power. This sparked the creation of a “criminal sociology research group,” one of whose most active members was André Davidovitch.

In 1924, Lévy-Bruhl became part of the editorial committee of L'Année Sociologique, the leading French sociological review. After World War II, he helped found the Centre d'Études Sociologique (1946). In the program at the center, Lévy-Bruhl taught for the first time an introductory course on research methodology, educating young jurists in social science techniques, focusing especially on the use of surveys as a tool for conducting sociolegal research.