Meaning and Definition

You are a second-year law student, not a sociology major, so start with the question a lawyer actually needs answered: why does a law degree in Mumbai make you sit through a paper on society at all? Because every statute you will ever read presumes a picture of how people live together — who owes duties to whom, what counts as marriage, what counts as a crime. Sociology is the discipline that studies that picture directly, instead of assuming it. Before you can argue that a law is unjust or outdated, you need the vocabulary to describe the society it operates on.

In two minutes

Sociology is the systematic study of society — of social relationships, institutions and processes — and it matters to a lawyer because law is one of the tools society uses to organise itself.

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.