Law as an Autonomous Discipline

This article considers claims about the ‘autonomy of law’. These are that that legal reasoning is different from other forms of reasoning; that legal decision-making is different from other forms of decision-making; that legal reasoning and decision-making are sufficient to themselves, that they neither need help from other approaches nor would they be significantly improved by such help; and that legal scholarship should be about distinctively legal topics (often referred to as ‘legal doctrine’) and is not or should not be about other topics.