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 and application of legal norms by those implementing law, including judges. His disciples, Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), Nicholas Timasheff (1886–1970), and Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) among them, also acquired worldwide recognition. These scholars emigrated shortly after the Russian Revolution. Sorokin, who obtained his PhD in criminal law in Russia and founded the first sociology department at the University of St. Petersburg, left Russia in 1923. His works written in the United States, including Social Mobility (1927) and Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928), defined those fields at the time.

Gurvitch taught at universities in Tomsk and Petrograd. After the revolution, he lived in France as a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne and then in the United States. His concept of “social law,” that is, law created by society, was opposed to “individualistic law,” which also denied the right of the state to a monopoly in generating law. He argued for “pluralistic collectivism,” based on the self-government of people and social partnerships.

Soviet scholars in the 1920s conducted serious sociological research on deviance, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, family and marriage, and tribal and national relations. The Department of Moral Statistics at the Central Statistic Administration, created in 1918 under the leadership of the criminologist Mikhail Gernet (1874–1953), sponsored these studies.

At the beginning of the 1930s, sociology in Russia was labeled a “bourgeois science,” and all theoretical and empirical studies in the social dimension of law were abandoned. Beginning in the mid-1960s, when sociology in Russia had a period of revitalization, sociological legal thinking was reflected in such publications as Lev Spiridonov's Social Development and Law. During most of Leonid Brezhnev's rule (1964–1982), a general sociological approach to law was not possible, except for some state-sponsored research on crime and deviance, conducted at law enforcement research institutes for their internal use and not available to the public or academicians. In the mid-1980s, researchers from these institutes emphasized the importance of social conditions for law and legal order and were able to apply sociological tools to empirical legal research.

A new dimension in the development of scholarly research about law as a social phenomenon appeared in the late 1980s. Some contemporary legal scholars considered sociology of law a constituent part of more general legal theory. Others considered it a separate discipline within legal science. Sociologists used to consider sociology of law a branch of social science, and Spiridonov shared that position.

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