* Law as a Human Science

NOT YET PUBLISHED

Law as a Human Science argues for the reintroduction of crucial aspects of the humanist tradition in legal thinking. Interdisciplinary studies of law are now primarily understood as policy-oriented and socio-legal in their orientation; whilst the older ties between law and the humanities (with philosophy, history, rhetoric, etc.) have become more marginal academic curiosities.

This book makes a renewed case for law as a human science, by investigating the development of modern law as an academic discipline in relation to both the social scientific and hermeneutical traditions. The former – more Anglophone – approach associates law with an instrumental notion of knowledge and science: legal knowledge can be exploited both as a practitioner's tool and to provide potentially workable solutions to social problems. In contrast, the hermeneutic – and more Continental – approach situates law among the human sciences. This makes the instrumentalisation of legal knowledge difficult, if not impossible. But it is this approach that Panu Minkkinen defends here, in a radicalisation of law’s traditional affiliations with the human sciences. The ‘hermeneutical legal academic’, he argues, provides not only a renewed basis for seeing law as a human science, but also a new foundation for understanding it as an essentially critical enterprise.

table of content

Introduction

 

Part 1: The Legal Academic

1. Max Weber and Legal Thinking

2. The Legal Academic's Impact

3. From Formal to Substantive Rationality

 

Part 2: The Science of Law

4. Law as a Moral Science

5. The Legal Academic as Interpreter

6. The Legal Academic and the Activist

 

Part 3: The Law School

7. The Edifying Law School

8. The Radical Law School

 

Part 4: The Politics of Legal Academia

9. Weber's Tragic Modernity