REMEMBER AGAIN: the law school faculty is principally a teaching faculty rather than one where individual researchers have staked out a particular piece of academic turf to cultivate with the aid of graduate assistants, and jealously to ward off invaders. Thus, at last winter's annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the published Proceedings give the impression of discussions primarily centered about how to teach a particular subject rather than discussions of research strategy, empirical findings or conceptual elaborations. In contrast, at the sociology meetings in San Francisco at the end of August, among 95 organized sessions there was only one small informal luncheon devoted to the teaching of sociology, and another, very sparsely attended, to innovation in higher education generally.

Of course, law professors do not need these annual meetings to inform each other about the research in which they are engaged. When I last counted them a few years ago, there were 150 law reviews, most of them hungry for literate copy; the law professor has no difficulty finding a professional outlet for his work. And if he does want to immerse himself in a particular social science so completely as to develop a new career, the non-hierarchical nature of a law school means that no one will make this difficult for him.

Yet in the main, the ties between the law schools and the other social sciences have remained fragmentary and at times even frivolous--mere snippets thrown into a collection of cases and materials to show that the professor is au courant.

Let me make clear that I regard this state of affairs as at least as much a reflection of the narrowness of professional social scientists as of any resistance on the side of the law schools--and remember again that I am talking about the major law schools and that small group who hope to become major. Last summer the Denver Law School played host to a summer institute at which several dozen law professors sought to familiarize themselves with sociological methods of inquiry transmitted by three sociologists who have had law school connections. Harvard and Rutgers also and no doubt other places have had seminars on law and the behavioral sciences. But sociologists, to take only my own guild, have only rarely tried to learn anything about the law except that those highly visible but peripheral escarpments which attract laymen generally: courtrooms and trials, criminals and the area of insanity, and constitutional litigation, especially in civil rights and civil liberties.

There are studies, to which I have already referred, of the sociology of the profession: who becomes a lawyer, and what sort of lawyer, and what does this reflect in family backing, undergraduate experience, and law school itself. But the main business of the practicing lawyer is not being touched in terms of his interaciton with corporate or governmental clients whom he helps to make decisions which have rather little to do with formal legal matters, and a fair amount to do with the fact that he is a privileged and trusted, quick and resourceful, semi-outsider.

Nor have we learned what lawyers bring to their careers outside the law: as college presidents and government officials, publishers and movie magnates, presidents of big corporations and founding fathers of the Peace Corps. We know not much more than Tocqueville had already noticed about the role of the lawyer in America, or what this presently means for our combativeness and cooperativeness, suspiciousness and trust, dependency and anarchy. What sociologists and political scientists have written about law and social control has seemed to me thin stuff. Yet it should be evident from what I have said that the law does offer to the academic social scientist one avenue for understanding our society and what makes it different from those like Japan, where go-betweens do the work here done by lawyers, or England, where accountants often do it, and what it is that gives the best law-trained men their easy access to people and problems.