Identity Crisis in the Legal Sciences
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Identity Crisis in the Legal Sciences Mark Van Hoecke (Ghent University & Tilburg University) In: Festschrift für Hubert Rottleuthner, Gesellschaft und Gerechtigkeit, Nomos 2011, pp.423-436 1. History of Legal Doctrine before the 19th Century Of all disciplines, legal science is probably the second oldest, after philosophy, just as lawyers are said to practise the second oldest profession (be it not after that of philo- sophers). The development of legal science during the Roman empire is considered to have started in the late Republican period (200 to 100 before Christ)1 and was mostly flourishing during the second and third century of the Christian calendar. This included highly developed law schools and a lot of quality scholarly writings2. During the 11th century, universities were founded, first in Bologna, partly prompted by scholarly research on rediscovered texts on Roman law. For many centuries universities had, besides the law faculty, only three other faculties, namely theology, arts and medicine. At least until the 18th century, legal science, in the form of legal doctrine, kept a very strong position, both within and outside academia. In the 18th and more so in the 19th centuries, however, the position of legal doctrine changed dramatically. With the advent and rapid development of the exact sciences and their successful research results, the conception of 'science' changed radically. During the Middle-Ages, 'authority' was a core criterion for considering an utterance to be 'scientific', while 'empirical evidence' was of little relevance. The disciplines taught at universities during the Middle-Ages were human sciences and the main criterion for their scholarly character was of a methodological nature: whether one was considered to be a scholar depended on the formal way in which one tried to prove something, mainly through logical syllogisms, and with the help of philosophy3. A statement was considered scientific when it could adequately refer to authoritative sources, e.g. the Bible or writings of Church Fathers for theology, the Codex Justinianus or writings of the glossators for legal science. It were these texts on which the syllogisms and other techniques of formal reasoning were applied, not empirical data. For that reason, 1 Some scholars let it start even earlier, with the law of the Twelve Tables: Schultz, History of Roman Legal Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967 (1st ed. 1946), 5. Anyway, there were already flourishing law school in Bayrouth before the Roman ones (Kunst 2 van den Bergh, Geleerd Recht. Een geschiedenis van de Europese rechtswetenschap in vogelvlucht, 2nd ed., Deventer: Kluwer, 1985, 13-14 3 Before the 19th century, physics was, not accidentally, called 'natural philosophy'. 2 interpretation was at the core of all disciplines and not only of human sciences. In the Middle-Ages, all scientific disciplines were mainly hermeneutical. 2. Tension between legal science and the model of the exact sciences During the 19th century in particular, impressive technological developments, resulting from research in exact sciences, such as physics and chemistry, contributed to a radical change in the conception of 'science' and, hence, in the ranking of scholarly disciplines, with physics on top and legal doctrine ranked far behind. Two other elements contributed to this weak position of legal doctrine as from the 19th century. First of all and in the context of the centralised nation states in continental Europe, drafting and enacting grand codes, such as the Code civil in France in 1804 and the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch in Germany in 1896, meant that the work of legal scholars was reduced to an uncreative exposition of the valid legal rules, combined with some historical comments and, rather marginally, some occasional interpretation of a text. Whereas previously, the Codes had themselves been the result of many centuries of creative interpretation and systematisation by legal scholars from varying legal sources in a legally pluralistic environment (customary law, canon law, Roman law, local regulations, etc.). Secondly, the ideology of the 'unity of science' came into being during the 19th century, and has been dominating academia ever since4. This is to be attributed mainly to positivism, most notably Auguste Comte5, and neo-positivism6. The naïve postulate of 4 This new ideology also encompassed a belief in replacing metaphysics by physics, metaphysical speculation by empirical facts, subjective interpretations by objective data. Moreover, it was also believed that the history of science was unilinear, moving from the dark past towards always increasing knowledge. Hence, this is an ideology of naïve optimism, coupled with an oversimplification of science(s): "Dans l'état positif, l'esprit humain reconnaissant l'impossibilité d'obtenir des notions absolues, renonce à chercher l'origine et la destination de l'univers et à connaître les causes intimes des phénomènes, pour s'attacher uniquement à découvrir, par l'usage bien combiné du raisonnement et de l'observation, leurs lois effectives, c'est-à-dire leurs relations invariables de succession et de similitude. L'explication des faits, réduite alors à ses termes réels, n'est plus désormais que la liaison établie entre les divers phénomènes particuliers et quelques faits généraux, dont les progrès de la science tendent de plus en plus à diminuer le nombre." (Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Paris: Hachette 1966, 1ière leçon, p.7-8) 5 Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Paris: Hachette 1966, 1ière leçon, p.27, where such a 'unity of sciences' is proclaimed. 6 See on this: Villa, 'Legal science between natural and human sciences', Legal Studies, 1984, 243-270 3 a presumed unity of methodology for all scientific disciplines has no other basis than a kind of aesthetic desire of simplicity in the epistemology and methodology of sciences. This dominating monist, totalitarian approach had catastrophic consequences for human sciences. Physics became the model and all other disciplines, henceforth, had to follow that model if they aspired to be 'scientific'. For legal doctrine, this meant a need to change its methods or to renounce its scientific status. Ever since, legal scholars have lived an identity crisis7, which has been considerably intensified recently due to the criteria used for financing research in academia. The 'quality' of research proposals from legal scholars is increasingly measured with the standards of the exact sciences. Moreover, an increasing part of the universities' financial budgets, and hence of the law faculties finances, is based on research funding. The identity crisis is increasingly becoming a financial crisis in law schools. How did legal scholars react to this development ? Basically, there are three different positions. A first group of scholars, and many legal practitioners, have considered the work of lawyers, including the 'research' of legal scholars as an 'art' (ius est ars aequi et boni), a craftsmanship, rather than a 'science'. This partly explains why law faculties, at least until recently, were not called 'faculty of legal science' (nor of legal 'sciences'), but 'faculty of law', 'Rechtsfakultät', 'faculté de droit', 'faculdad de derecho' or, mainly in The Netherlands, 'Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid' (faculty of legal erudition, where 'learned (wo)men' are educated, not 'scholars'). This position entails an abdication from the scientific status and raises questions about the place for a law faculty within universities. A second group of legal scholars argued that their writings should be considered as 'scientific', be it that they use different methods compared to most other disciplines. 7 See e.g., the comments from scholars from other disciplines mentioned in: Stolker, 'Ja, geléérd zijn jullie wel!; over de status van de rechtswetenschap', Nederlands Juristenblad 2003, 766-778, where the author also refers to similar comments within the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, as noted down by Professor Paul Scholten in 1942. In France, research units in all faculties are called 'Laboratoire de …'. This sounds quite strange for law faculties who do not have any infrastructure that would come close to a 'laboratory'. 4 However, not many attempts have been made to underpin this position nor to develop a research methodology that would be different from methodologies used in legal practice. This position does not succeed in showing the difference between legal practice and legal scholarship and is not convincing as to the scientific status of its methodology. In the recent past, this problem has partly been discarded by the system of 'A1 journals': each discipline can draft a list of international journals with peer review, where usually only articles are published that meet certain standards of quality according to the scholars of that discipline. However, most legal scholars, working in an area of domestic law, are faced with the problem that they usually, if not exclusively, publish in national journals. In the exact sciences there is one single international scientific language, English, and one single scientific forum, which is, by definition, international. Legal scholars, however, mostly carry out research about some problem of their domestic law and publish it in the local language. If this is not English they are in trouble8, as the internationally used list of 'A1 journals' for law counts 133 English language journals, 3 in Spanish and just 1 in German (in criminology). No French, no Russian, no