Law as a Human Science

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.

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