Abstract
The cultures of legal scholarship and legal education are decidedly different in the US and in countries belonging to the civil law tradition, such as Germany and Austria. While North American legal academia has proudly transcended the horizon of mere doctrine and embraced a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the civil law tradition appears to be still committed to the “science of law”. It is argued that, in the context of the latter, the moment of transcendence is the preserve of the philosophy of law.
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Notes
- 1.
I am drawing on language by Christine M. Korsgaard (2009a) here.
- 2.
“Ontonomy” is the study of how being develops conceptions of itself in order to understand itself (see Gabriel 2006, p. 164).
- 3.
My eccentricity is manifest in Wissen des Rechts (see Somek 2018).
- 4.
On the new doctrinalism, see, for example, Anne Fleming (2015), pp. 337–343.
- 5.
See the obituary in Rottleuthner (1982), pp. 124–153.
- 6.
For an overview of the study literature on this, see https://libguides.law.uiowa.edu/legalwriting (last visited 2/16/2021).
- 7.
See Justice Breyer’s remark in Dorsen (2005), p. 522: “[…] Law emerges from a complex interactive democratic process. We justices play a limited role in that process. But we are part of it. So are lawyers, law professors, students and ordinary citizens. The process amounts to a kind of conversation. That conversation is among judges, among professors, among members of the bar, among those who decide cases, among those who analyze and put together series of decisions, among those with practical experience at the bar. Law emerges from that messy but necessary conversational process. We judges participate in that conversation, when we decide cases and we can do so, too, when we speak more generally about the law and about the decision-making process itself.”
- 8.
See, for example, the statement on the University of Chicago Law School website: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/prospectives/lifeofthemind/socraticmethod (last visited 2/16/2021).
- 9.
An elegant defense and critical discussion of this approach can be found in Bennett and Solum (2011).
- 10.
- 11.
Social Choice Theory is concerned with the difficulties and paradoxical outcomes of multi-person decision making. For a particularly successful example of the application of multi-person decision making models to individuals, see Katz (2012).
- 12.
This has been the case at least since the emergence of the so-called “jurisprudence of interests” (see Somek 1992).
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Somek, A. (2022). Two Worlds of Legal Scholarship and the Philosophy of Law. In: Bersier, N., Bezemek, C., Schauer, F. (eds) Common Law – Civil Law. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 139. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87718-7_10
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