Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain

by Roger Cotterrell

This book seeks to provide a fully comprehensive and systematic account of Durkheim’s legal theory. Indeed, because his writings on law and on the sociology of law are scattered throughout his work, this book is in fact the first attempt in English to provide a detailed analysis of the entirety of Durkheim’s legal thought.

The author argues that for Durkheim legal questions and moral questions were ultimately inseparable—not so much because law and morality cannot be analytically disentangled (as some legal philosophers argue), as because morality is embodied in the conditions of social life, the rules for which are articulated by law. Thus, for Durkheim, the study of law was an absolutely essential and central part of the sociological enterprise.

Law aspires to express the moral commitments of people living in many different kinds of relationships of community, reflecting the values of those whose life it regulates. Durkheim’s writings have a parallel they use history, ethnography, and social theory to uncover the intricate and shifting moral foundations of law—foundations uncovered empirically by studying the social phenomena in which they reside, and by understanding the nature of those phenomena and the conditions of their being.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Roger Cotterrell studied law and sociology at the University of London and taught at Leicester University before joining the Queen Mary faculty where he has been Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory since 2005. He was Acting Head and Head of the College's Department of Law between 1989 and 1991, Dean of the Faculty of Laws from 1993 to 1996 and Professor of Legal Theory from 1990 to 2005. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005 and of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2014. In 2013 he was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association life-time achievement award for contributions to the socio-legal community.