A prolific writer in several languages and famous lecturer with a large following of students, Petrażycki committed suicide in 1931.

English speakers still largely rely on a compilation of Petrażycki's writings edited by the Russian-American sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff in 1955.

If this legal experience refers to normative facts in a broad sense (statutes, court decisions, but also contracts, customs, commands of any sort) he calls it "positive law"; if it lacks such reference, he talks of "intuitive law".

Its practitioners are not judges and advocates, but each individual citizen..." (Petrażycki 1897, as quoted by Motyka) Petrażycki's theory of law is anti-statist and very critical of the legal positivism of his time, which he takes to task for being naive and lacking a truly scientific basis because of its focus on norms, rather than the experience of those norms.

His influence on the sociology of law has been primarily indirect through some of his students, specifically Nicholas S. Timasheff, Georges Gurvitch, and Pitirim Sorokin, who each in various ways contributed to formulate a more distinctly sociological perspective, derived from and complementary to Petrażycki's psychological theory.