Objectivity in Law and Legal Reasoning

Legal theorists consider their discipline as an objective endeavour in line with other fields of science. Objectivity in science is generally regarded as a fundamental condition, informing how science should be practised and how truths may be found. Objective scientists venture to uncover empirical truths about the world and ought to eliminate personal biases, prior commitments and emotional involvement. However, legal theorists are inevitably bound up with a given legal culture. Consequently, their scholarly work derives at least in part from this environment and their subtle interaction with it. This book questions critically, in novel ways and from various perspectives, the possibilities of objectivity of legal theory in the twenty-first century. It transpires that legal theory is unavoidably confronted with varying conceptions of law, underlying ideologies, approaches to legal method, argumentation and discourse etc, which limit the possibilities of 'objectivity' in law and in legal reasoning. The authors of this book reveal some of these underlying notions and discuss their consequences for legal theory.

Jaakko Husa is Professor of Law and Globalisation at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Mark Van Hoecke is Professor of Comparative Law at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Professor of Comparative Law and Legal Theory at Ghent University, Belgium.

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.