These first two aims are joined in my presentation of the social
theory of law, a symbolic interactionist-based view of law which serves
as a common analytical baseline for socio-legal studies and legal theory.
I apply the social theory of law to offer answers to many of the core
issues in jurisprudence, including: what is law? what is law's relation to
society? what is the nature of legal positivism? is law indeterminate? is
law just politics? While I cannot claim to have conclusively resolved any
one of these questions, what I have done is show how they can be
approached and understood from a realistic, informed social science
perspective.

My third aim is to mount a response to the increasing influence of
the self-avowed critical school of socio-legal theory. I argue that this
critical approach is epistemologically unsound, potentially harmful to
the socio-legal enterprise, and does little to advance the political causes
critical scholars tout. Because my political views substantially overlap
with those of critical scholars, in this work I find myself in the uncom-
fortable position of being most critical of scholars for whom I have a
great deal of sympathy. But my conviction that the critical approach
does more harm than good for the political causes we share compels
me to present this response.

Chapter One is the Introduction, in which I briefly describe the intel-
lectual currents that surround the field of socio-legal studies, and I elab-
orate on the most prominent problems the field currently suffers from.
This Chapter will set the scene for the foundation laying to come. The
realistic approach I elaborate will respond to the problems that dog the
field.

Chapter Two establishes the theoretical foundation for realistic socio-
legal studies by laying out and then drawing upon philosophical prag-
matism. I discuss the current popularity of pragmatism in legal theory,
and I use pragmatism and its connections to Legal Realism to locate
the position of socio-legal studies in relation to the current schools of
legal theory, especially Critical Legal Studies and Law and Economics.
An important aspect of this discussion will be to ground the fact-value
distinction in the only way it can be understood consistent with post-
modernism.

Chapter Three discusses behaviourism and interpretivism, with their
respective emphases on behaviour and meaning, as they have been
invoked in legal theory and socio-legal studies. A realistic approach
draws equally from both, though that is easier said than done since so
much of their past interaction has been antagonistic. I articulate the

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