LII Legal Information Institute
The institutions of social construction, social norms, dispute processing and legal culture are key areas for inquiry in this knowledge field. In the United States the field is usually called law and society studies; in Europe it is more often referred to as socio-legal studies. At first, jurists and legal philosophers were suspicious of sociology of law. Civil law jurisdictions treat contracts differently in a number of respects, with a more interventionist role for the state in both the formation and enforcement of contracts. In France, an ordinary contract is said to form simply on the basis of a “meeting of the minds” or a “concurrence of wills”. Their ‘abstraction principle’ means that the personal obligation of contract forms separately from the title of property being conferred.
- Codifications date back millennia, with one early example being the Babylonian Codex Hammurabi.
- Yet classification is a matter of form rather than substance