Methodologies of Legal Research : Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline?

Van Hoecke, Mark (EDT)

ISBN 10: 1849464995 / ISBN 13: 9781849464994

Published by Hart Publishing, 2013

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 19194843-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Methodologies of Legal Research : Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline?
• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1849464995
• ISBN 13: 9781849464994
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Until quite recently questions about methodology in legal research have been largely confined to understanding the role of doctrinal research as a scholarly discipline. In turn this has involved asking questions not only about coverage but, fundamentally, questions about the identity of the discipline. Is it (mainly) descriptive, hermeneutical, or normative? Should it also be explanatory? Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behaviour, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient.
Consequently many attempts have been made to conceive legal research differently. Social scientific and comparative approaches have proven fruitful. However, does the introduction of other approaches leave merely a residue of 'legal doctrine', to which pockets of social sciences can be added, or should legal doctrine be merged with the social sciences? What would such a broad interdisciplinary field look like and what would its methods be? This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

About the Authors

Mark Van Hoecke is Professor of Comparative Law at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

François Ost is Professor of Law at the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Belgium. He is Co-director of the European Academy of Legal Theory based at the KUB and FUSL in Brussels.