This major new textbook provides a clear and comprehensive guide to the sociology of law, surveying current theoretical debates and examining socio-legal research. Exploring the relationship between the law and other aspects of social life, it goes beyond a discussion of contemporary institutions, focusing on broad and general patterns grounded in specific examples from a wide range of contexts. The book addresses: the social conditions under which laws emerge and are changed; the extent to which law can be a resource to implement social change; the kinds of values or world views that laws incorporate; and the ways in which laws shape social institutions and practices and vice versa. Accessible and wide-ranging, Law and S.