The general functionalist legal history method, for example, "is to construct (or, as is rather more common, to assume without much discussion) a typology of stages of social development and then to show how legal forms and institutions have satisfied, or failed to satisfy, the functional requirements of each stage. Obviously, an enormous gap in sophistication and conceptual power separates the best worst examples of this method. At its best, as in Weber’s work, complex bundles of rules are tied through explicit theorizing to elaborate accounts of social development. At its comically vulgar worst, the method produces wholly speculative functional rationales for legal rules in underlying social changes -- vacuously described rationales such as ‘the evolution of the right of privacy was a response to the increasing complexity and interdependence of modern society.’"

"The critics’ basic argument ... is that by taking the world as we know it as largely determined by impersonal social forces, evolutionary-functionalists obscure the ways in which these seemingly inevitable processes are actually manufactured by people who claim (and believe themselves) to be only passively adapting to such processes. If there are evolutionary processes in social life, they are processes whose logic is one of multiplicity, not uniformity of forms. The social nature of human beings reveals itself not through constant responses to their environments but through an astonishing diversity of cultural responses and, most remarkable of all, a repeatedly demonstrated capacity to reimagine their situations so as to generate novel responses still." [Robert W. Gordon, "Critical Legal Histories," 36 Stan. L. Rev. 57, 64, 70-71 (1984)]