RULES, RESOURCES, AND LEGITIMACY PROCESSES - SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL-CONFLICT, ORDER, AND CHANGE

Current scholarship on how science affects law's legitimacy in advance d capitalist democracies yields inconsistent predictions and findings. This article resolves inconsistencies and provides new insights by co nstructing 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 s pecifies how competing legal and scientific rule/resource sets shape a ction 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 econo my, the polity, and education.