ABSTRACT
The forerunners of the sociology of law are extremely numerous, for this branch of knowledge arose spontaneously in the course of historical or ethnographic studies relating to law and in the course of researches on law pursuing other aims; such as the establishment of a social ideal, or a mechanist, realist, or relativist philosophy of law or a technical discussion about "sources of law." Of course, this "spontaneous sociology of law", as opposed to methodical sociology of law, did not ordinarily touch on more than one of the problems we have designated (owing to the character of the works in which it appeared): we find the authors dealing exclusively either with problems concerning the origin of law, or concerning the relation between the social reality of law and the other social phenomena, or concerning the jural typology of groups often wrongly limited to State forms. The interdependence of the different parts of this discipline has in any case never been envisaged in this discussion.
