Anti-Traditional Pure Legal Sociology

Donald Black, a famous jurist in contemporary United States, is one of representatives of behaviorism school of law and sociology school of law. Theories of behaviorism object that law is used as some effective rules or binding decrees, and they consider that law is behaviors of law subjects, such as judges, procurators, police and lawyers, and they focus on "law consists in observable behavior but not in rules". Law is the behaviors of law subjects, so that the task of sociology of law is to do research on law behavior., Black developed behaviorism of law to the biggest extent. He researched not only behaviors of law subjects, but also behaviors of law itself. He pursued a goal persistently in 30 years that he studied law phenomena just like scientists researched on natural phenomena and the way to supply a whole series of objective and wide-applicable method and theory to analyze, explain and predict law changes. He advocated beyond value judgment, expelling psychological factors, purpose factors and even "human being" itself to observe and analyze law and all social phenomena objectively as others did in physics and astronomy, so it is called "pure sociology of law". Black thought that policy was regarded as the target and guide of sociology of law in the past and this confused science and policy. However, his target was to pursue science in law and he considered that science could not include value judgment, and objectivity of value and science of law phenomena were totally different. Black not only researched on law operation by means of formula, but also applied his research results to judicial procedure. He analyzed every possible social factors affecting judicial judgment, revealed unavoidable facts in judicial operation and put forward his imaginable solutions. He expected to decrease and even eliminate social differences in different cases through some reforms, one is to allow common citizens to establish some kind of organization (legal co-operative associations) and provide convenience for them, and the other one is to eliminate social characteristics of cases (the desocialization of law). Inspired by traditional American experimentalism sociology of law, his theory based on Positivism philosophy and used behavioral jurisprudence as its methodology and developed on basis of American realism jurisprudence.Black's theory expels teleology, psychology and even certain analysis unit in law research, so his concise, novelty and creative theory has universality and can be examined by experience and practice. His contribution to sociology of law is indelible. His methodology that pursues beyond value judgment and advocates pure science is a rebellion against popular pragmatism stream in the United States. Although it is a kind of hypercorrection somehow, it still brings new atmosphere to research of sociology of law and new energy to law research. Although there are still some points need to be discussed later, for example, the definition of law, Black's work is inspiring and extends the range of law research greatly. People are not restricted to research on legalism mechanically and normatively any more, and they pay more attention to how the law is operated and functions in true life. His theory is of great value especially for judicial activity. Just as Mr. Ji Weidong evaluated, "He supplies an analysis framework to understand and predict the changes and relationship between law and society by the most simple and graceful way and provides the concept foundation for history, sociology and anthropology, of which part concerning to law system. After reading and analyzing Black's work, the writer studied his theory deeply and systematically, got the soul of behaviorism jurisprudence and pure sociology of law and then realized the jurisprudence's new direction of development and the way of research. It is valuable to research on Black's theory and apply his theory to justic practically.