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20 Soc. & Legal Stud. 3 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/solestu20 and id is 1 raw text is: Article Social & Legal Studies 20(1) 3-20 justice, Digniy, Torture, e ors 0 Reprints and permission: Headscarves: C an sagepub.c.uk/journasPermnissi .nav Heads arves CanDOI: 10. 1177/0964663910378433 Durkheim's Sociology ®SAGE Clarify Legal Values? Roger Cotterrell Queen Mary University of London Abstract EImile Durkheim's claims about justice, human dignity and the value system of moral individualism in complex modern societies are part of the canon of classical theoretical ideas that underpin social research. Yet these claims are often neglected in socio-legal studies or seen as remote from much current Western legal experience. This article examines Durkheim's sociological conceptions of justice, dignity and individualism to demonstrate their usefulness for the study of legal values in contemporary Western societies. Applying these ideas to such diverse clusters of topics as punishment and the use of torture, on the one hand, and sexuality and the wearing of Islamic headscarves, on the other, it argues that his work sheds important new light on current legal controver- sies and provides enduring insights for a developing sociology of legal values. Keywords Durkheim, human dignity, Islamic headscarf, legal values, punishment, sociology of justice, sociology of law, sociology of morals, torture Introduction Can sociology tell us what is right or wrong? For most social scientists (and surely most citizens) the answer is clearly no. Sociology claims to be science, not moral philosophy. Sociology of law, for example, aims to explain the social character of law, but not whether any particular law or legal regime is just, or morally sound. A few leading mod- em legal sociologists have disagreed. Philip Selznick, for example, influenced especially Corresponding author: Roger Cotterrell, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK Email: r.b.m.cotterrell@qmul.ac.uk

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