Rules, Resources, and Legitimacy Processes: Some Implications for Social Conflict, Order, and Change

Current scholarship on how science affects law's legitimacy in advanced capitalist democracies yields inconsistent predictions and findings. This article resolves inconsistent and provides new insights by constructing a general framework relating law's legitimacy to the mix of legal and scientific rationalities in law. Consistent with dualistic visions of structure as both rules/schemas and resources, the theory specifies how competing legal and scientific rule/resource sets shape action and produce order and change through conflict in and over legal institutions. The theory's guiding orientations illuminate legitimacy processes, order, and change in other institutions including the economy, the polity, and education.