Academic

Smits on Normative Legal Theory

By Lawrence Solum

Jan M. Smits (Tilburg University - Tilburg Institute of Comparative and Transnational Law (TICOM)) has posted Redefining Normative Legal Science: Towards an Argumentative Discipline (METHODS OF HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH, F. Coomans, F. Grünfeld, M. Kamminga, eds., Antwerp-Oxford, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Academic legal scholarship increasingly relies on non-normative perspectives. This raises the question what is actually the core of academic legal scholarship and what methodology legal academics should adopt. In this contribution, it is argued that the focus in the present debate should not be on how other disciplines than the law can help us to make the academic study of law more ?scholarly.? Instead, the question should be how the legal approach itself can better match the expectations one has about a truly scholarly discipline of law. To this end, the purpose of normative legal scholarship is redefined.

For some reason, I cannot copy from the text of the PDF file. So let me say instead that I found this paper very interesting & even if you do not wish to read the whole paper, you might find yourself wanting to read more if you start with the paragraph that begins on page six and continues.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 02, 2009 (boomark / email).