Around 1900, Max Weber outlined his “scientific” strategy to law, figuring out the “authorized rational form” as a sort of domination, not attributable to non-public authority but to the authority of abstract norms. Formal legal rationality was his term for the key characteristic of the kind of coherent and calculable law that was a precondition for contemporary political developments and the modern bureaucratic state. Weber saw this law as having developed in parallel with the expansion of capitalism. Other notable early authorized sociologists included Hugo Sinzheimer, Theodor Geiger, Georges Gurvitch and Leon Petrażycki in Europe, and William Graham Sumner in the U.S. Criminal law, also referred to as penal law, pertains to crimes and punishment.
- This distinction is stronger in civil law countries, particularly those with a separate system of administrative courts; by contrast, the public-private law divide is much less pronounced in frequent law jurisdictions.
- State-enforced laws can be