The Interactions of Legal and Social Change

The controversy between those who believe that law should essentially follow, not lead, and that it should do so slowly, in response to clearly formulated social sentiment- and those  who believe   that the law should be a determined agent in the creation of new norms, is one of the recurrent themes of the history of legal thought. It is tellingly illustrated by the conflicting approaches of Sevigne and Bentham. For Sevigne, a bitter opponent of the renationalizing and lawmaking tendencies spurred by the French Revolution, law was 'found', not made. Savigny particularly deprecated the trend towards the codification of law, inaugurated by the Napoleonic codes, and spreading rapidly over the civilized world.

Keywords:
Society , Civilization, Change, Legal Change