The Behavior of Law: A Theoretical Integration

Donald Black’s The Behavior of Law contains the most powerful sociological theory of legal variation ever produced. Despite the critical reactions of some analysts, the generality, testability, originality, and validity of the theory have been well-established. The one area where the theory can be improved, however, involves the criterion of “parsimony.” The following paper demonstrates that roughly two dozen of Black’s original propositions actually reduce to four primary propositions, characterized in terms of status locations along the different vectors of social space. Each of the original propositions can be deduced from these four general propositions without losing any explanatory value or the capacity to order existing “facts” in regard to legal variation.