Radcliffe-Brown was primarily the disciple of Durkheim who contributed most decisively to make the French sociologist’s theories accepted in the Anglo-Saxon culture. In this sense, he believed that the basic mission of human sciences was to describe guidelines for the behaviour of the society in question, which meant that the form of ethnology that most attracted his interest was legal ethnology. As for his conception of law, he adopted the one expounded by Roscoe Pound, realising neither that it is not fully applicable to primitive law, nor that a functional perspec-tive of law fits into the context of his doctrine better than a structural one. In any case, Radcliffe-Brown sees the legal phenomenon as one of the mechanisms of harmonisation of social life, probably the most important one.