Introduction

Abstract

The term ‘legisprudence’ first appeared in an article by the American lawyer Julius Cohen (1950) to refer to the study of legislation as a fully legitimate part—indeed, a crucial one—of jurisprudence. Since then, it has slowly come to be widely accepted as referring to a whole field of studies in which both jurists and scholars of a non-strictly-legal background have their say—and rightly so. Although it has correctly been observed that legal scholars are in the best position to make legislation their object of inquiry, since dealing with laws is their daily bread either as academics or practitioners, this does not by itself help much in shrinking the borders of what appears to be a substantially large province. After all, jurisprudence itself is an extremely vast domain, comprising doctrinal, philosophical and sociological approaches and combining them with a number of disciplines, ranging from linguistics to political science, neuroscience, economics and moral philosophy, to name a few. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that even its legisprudential subsector should appear as offering a variety of approaches and requiring contributions from diverse disciplines.