Is there a danger that sociological approaches to law end up creating law in their own image? Can they set their own limits? Could they help further rather than hinder the process by which law becomes more techno- cratic? Continuing a debate with Roger Cotterrell, this paper offers an examination of Cotterrells suggestion, in the last issue, that these dangers can be avoided provided that sociological interpretation of legal ideas recognizes an allegiance to law rather than to academic sociology.By contrast, I propose a reflexive strategy intended to invite sociology to examine the ways in which its discourses and practices are both similar to but also different from those of law.Sociology was born in a state of hostility to law. N.S. TimashevA little sociology leads away from the law, much sociology leads back to it. M. HauriouWhat is law for sociology? And what is sociology to law? Above all, what is sociology of law and more generally any other study of law and good for? From its emergence as a topic of academic enquiry there has been division and sometimes competition between those approaches to the sociological understanding of law whose main aim is to reveal what law is unable (or unwilling) to see, and those whose goal is to help law see moreclearly. The first approach relates law to its wider historical and social environment, and to competing and overlapping disciplines and practices,and has little difficulty in showing how legal actors often have little grasp Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA* Distinguished Research Professor of Law, Cardiff Law School, P.0. Box 247, Cardiff CF1 1XD, Wales, and Professor of Sociology, Macerata University, Macerata, ItalyI should like to thank my friend Roger Cotterrell for providing me with a pre-publication draft of his paper in the last issue and encouraging the continuation in these pages of the many stimulating discussions we used to have as fellow teachers on the London University LLM Law and Social Theory course.407JOURNAL OFLAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 25,NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER1998 ISSN: 0263323X, pp. 40726Blinding Insights? The Limits of a Reflexive Sociology of LawDAVIDNELKEN*of the factors which shape the inputs and outcomes of their decisions. The second presupposes most of these constraints and seeks to improve the quality of decision making in terms which can be used by legal actors. Wherethe first type of scholarship deliberately transforms legal definitions into sociological categories1the second seeks to translate sociological insights into legal concepts.2 How do these approaches relate? Is there a way of combining them? More precisely, how far can the methods useful for showing the limits of laws sociological understanding of the world also be used for helping law to over- come those limits? Whereas we should expect there to be much common ground3there have always also been scholars who have argued that a synthesis is neither possible nor desirable. Typically the concern of many sociologists of law has been that the pull of the policy audience,4or the limitations of practical decision making in legal settings, would compromise the proper development of academic social science or blunt the edge of political critique. But there is also an opposite worry and it is this which will be my topic in this paper. Here the charge is that the introduction of different styles of reasoning can have ill effects for legal practice by misunderstanding and thus threatening the integrity of legal processes or the values they embody.5In particular, the introduction of social scientism will either succeed all too easily in making law more of a policy science than is really good for it, as is claimed by many adhering to the law and literature movement,6or else, even in failing, will produce a hybrid monstrosity which is neither law or social science, as asserted by autopoieticists such as Gunther Teubner.7408 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 19981 All the major textbooks, including Roger Cotterrells magisterial synthesis of the field, recon- ceptualize legal phenomena in terms of issues such as social order, social control, regulation, dispute processing, governmentality, desert, distribution, power, symbolism, ideology, orrationality, rather than the doctrinal definitions of lawyers or administrative categories.2 This classification is put forward by John Monahan and Laurens Walker in their leading United States casebook, Social Science in Law (1994): we here view social science as an analytic tool in the law, familiarity with which will heighten the lawyers professional effec- tiveness and sharpen the legal scholars insights. The principal alternative to the insider perspective on the relation of social science to law is the “law and society” or sociology of law approach which seeks to understand the functioning of law as a social system. Variationson this distinction are