Replying to critiques, Friedman explains the problematic scientific nature of the Law and Society movement by comparing the way the Law and Society movement relates to the legal system to the way the sociology of religion relates to religious life:

"Sociologists of religion study religion as a social phenomenon. It is no part of their business to decide whether this religion, or this dogma or belief, is true or false, moral or immoral. Religions are systems of beliefs and behaviors that rest on faith, tradition, emotions, moral postulates. They can also be studied as aspects of life in society. The same is true of legal systems. They can be studied as social phenomena, without passing judgment on their normative content.

This point easily gets lost in the shuffle. And not without some reason. Academics, whose interest in law goes beyond professional training, usually have some inner drive, some program that is strongly normative. In Europe, most law and society people started out in legal philosophy, and drifted over in the direction of social science. In the process, they never quite molted old skins. They never decisively passed out of sociological jurisprudence into the sociology of law. But between a philosophy of law that is "social" and a sociology of law, there is a world of difference.

Of course, it is natural for scholars to be concerned with moral problems. The line between the "science" of law and the normative reasons and postulates of legal scholars can easily become indistinct. And, though it is all very well to say that the law and society movement has no normative program of its own, that it is interested only in knowledge, in fact, there is something of a program. They very idea of an objective, nonnormative study of law casts doubt on the notion that there are "right" or "wrong" legal answers. Everything, rather, is or can be shown to be socially contingent. But an "outside" science of law makes impossible an "inside" science of law, or a Rechtswissenschaft -- that is, a discipline internal to the legal system, which derives its reasons from "legal," autonomous principles. A similar point could be made about the sociology of religion. The idea of an objective study of religion, which examines how religions change over time and which explores the relationship between belief systems and culture, makes it harder to accept claims of supernatural authority. Cultural relativity tends to weaken the grip of absolute systems, in general. But cultural relativity, in one form or another, is at the very core of the social sciences.

In short: The law and society movement sits on a rather narrow ledge. It uses scientific method; its theories are, in principle, scientific theories; but what it studies is a loose, wriggling, changing subject matter, shot through and through with normative ideas. It is a science (or a would-be science) about something thoroughly nonscientific."

[Lawrence M. Friedman, "The Law and Society Movement," 38 Stan. L. Rev. 763, 765-766 (1986)]