Is law important?

Instrumentalism is the belief that legal rules are important because they cause social phenomena. It has come to dominate modem thought about law, especially in the United States. In this lecture, Professor Griffiths examines the evidence bearing upon the modern orthodoxy and concludes that the instrumental effects of law are probably of only marginal importance and interest. He proposes a new conception of the relationship of legal rules to social phenomena: a conception in which legal rules no longer stand in an essentially causal relation to those phenomena, but are rather seen as an inseparable aspect of them.