Contenu du sommaire : Pratiques de recherche, questions théoriques et problèmes épistémologiques sur le droit et la société.

One of the characteristics of post-modem culture is its concern with space and with particular spaces. The analysis of social phenomena and representations may, therefore, benefit from the science that has taught us how to read space : cartography. This is what this paper attempts to do by drawing on a symbolic cartography of law in the field of sociology of law. The relative decanonization of law thus achieved enables us to ask questions and offer classifications regardless of the juridical science, and allows for a definition of a specific theoretical object for the sociology of law. The new sociological theory of law here outlined is presided over by the concepts of legal pluralism, interlegality, and the new juridical common sense.

The study focuses on the duty that the German Federal Constitutional Court has imposed on Parliament to respect some principles of legislative method. The court thus avoids controlling substantially certain rationality requirements that it cannot itself guarantee. In doing so the Court integrates into law rules developed by legislative method, a new discipline very much advanced in Germany but pratically unheard of in France. This integration, now being developed in various countries, is problematical for various reasons. It contributes to the re-enforcement of the transfer of power to the bureaucracy ; it probably overestimates the contribution that social sciences bring to the legislation ; it provoques the difficult meeting of two normative orders, turned on the one hand towards the concretisation of constitutional values and on the other hand towards the optimalization of the effects of the law. Apart frorn its problematic, the study will have reached a first aim if it helps making the French public aware of a new discipline full of promises : legislative method.

When the legal historian spends some time in archives, she/he realizes that the law cannot be studied as a self-contained subject, but must be constantly situated in its environment. No purely legal methodology will allow one to understand the meaning of everyday social practice, which is the true creator of law. Unless one brings to bear the appropriate methodology, which draws on sociology, demography, psychology, anthropology, research will produce totally desembodied results. Legal history cannot allow itself to ignore social, political and economic reality.

This article presents and discusses three theoretical propositions. 1. "Juvenile courts" within different jurisdictions may be characterised by an underlying conflict between"Judge" and "Expert" over the "control of reality". 2. It is possible in examining the operation of the english and french jurisdiction for minors to identify factors between these two types of actors which are common to the two Systems. 3. The construction of reality is a highly complex process which through "negociation" generally results in compromise between judge and expert. Such compromises are necessary for the successful functionning of "juvenile courts" as social institutions.

In order to study the way in which law rules childhood, the author opposes swiss law with its practice as regards the blurred notion of the child's interest. By so doing, she draws through her analysis four parameters which are used by legal practice in order to convey a concrete content to this undeterrnined notion, and like'wise elaborate a specific legal profile for the child, this new character on the legal scene, object of the preoccupations of the swiss legislator, at the time of the revision of the right of filiation in 1976. While examining the child's wavering between parental authority and the authority of governmental institutions, the author puts into light the social dynamics of a dual movement in the child's submission : a) towed by the nuclear family considered as the normative mould ; b) its subordination to new governmental institutions, the hegemony of which surreptitiously but slowly nibbles away the area of freedom of the household. The conclusions of this legal enquiry are enlightering : for the sake of his interest, the child's right of speech is stolen away from him. This appropriation is set in the framework of new public morals which have invested the private sphere with new legitimations.

The classical grammar in France (from the Port-Royal to the reedition of the Grammaire des Grammaires in 1842) has been studied particularly as a theory of representation, or as a theory of meaning. It is suggested in this paper that it could be best considered as a juridical theory. There are numerous legal aspects especially in the metadiscourse of the grammar of that time, no matter what the school of the grammarian be. The article illustrates this point and outlines some general themes arising out of it.

For Durkheim, the moralization of professions is an essential determination for moralization of society as a whole. Present debates among "specialists" attempting to develop artificial procreation ethics allow to think in a different way. Chances indeed that an individual has to take part in the development of collective morals prove to depend on the way he can solve what appears to him as an antinomy between two normative orders. A comparison between attitudes of biologists and physicians of medecine involved in these debates show that access to an "ethical" position appears as a transgression of this "special moral" that professional ideal represents. Expressive compulsions facilitate it, but only professional dominance and extra-professional visibility authorize it.