Change — Social change

The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 abolished polygamy for Hindus and gave women a statutory right to divorce — both direct attempts by law to accelerate a social change that custom alone was not delivering. Every reform statute you will study assumes social change is possible, desirable and, at least partly, engineerable. This topic asks what social change actually is, what causes it, and what part law plays among several competing forces — education, media, technology — that drive or resist it.

In two minutes

Social change is any significant alteration, over time, in a society's structure, institutions, norms or values, driven by a combination of factors — technological, economic, cultural, demographic and legal — and law is one deliberate instrument among several, including education and media, that a society uses to accelerate change it wants and resist change it does not.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Sociology on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.