Legal Methods under Discussion

Law and method' is a combination of terms that makes many legal scholars slightly uneasy.In most sciences, generally accepted methods are the core of what constitutes the scientific discipline in question and what defines its scientific character.This is not the case for the discipline of law.It shares many of its methods with legal practice and has long left its methods implicit.Recently, however, methodology has become an issue for lawyers as well.The growth of interdisciplinary studies, especially socio-legal studies and law and economics, has confronted lawyers with other disciplines which have much to say about methods.In The Netherlands this has led to an ardent debate about the methods of legal scholarship.This debate has many layers: there are different opinions not only about the methods legal scholars should use but also about the need for making methods explicit.The connection to legal practice plays an important role here as well: it is sometimes regarded as an impediment to the development of serious legal scholarship, while others see the methods of practical legal reasoning as rightly continuous with those of scholarship.