Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Law Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00478.x |
| Author | Geoffrey Samuel |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 36, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2009
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 431±59
Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Law
Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?
Geoffrey Samuel*
This article questions whether those outside law should take law
seriously as an intellectual discipline capable of contributing to the
development of epistemological thinking in the natural and social
sciences. The discipline is approached from a diachronic and syn-
chronic position with emphasis on the civil law tradition. It will be
shown that the governing paradigm in legal studies has always been
the `authority paradigm', which results in law being closer to theology
than to the social sciences. Its principal actors (judges) make asser-
tions free from the normal constraints of scientific method; accord-
ingly, the idea of a `legal science' (imported into the common law
tradition after 1846) must be treated with great caution. It is not a
science dedicated to enquiring about the nature of the physical world,
society or social relations. Its epistemological development remains
trapped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: thus, as a
discipline, law has little to offer other social sciences.
In an article published in this journal a few years ago on interdisciplinarity
and law, Douglas Vick concluded that `the assimilation of law into the
culture of another discipline will not occur'. The reason for this situation,
says the writer, is that the `core identity of the discipline has not been, and
likely will not be, fundamentally altered by interdisciplinary study'.
1
Indeed
431
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Kent Law School, Eliot College, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NS,
England
g.h.samuel@kent.ac.uk
This article was researched and written in part during research leave granted to the author
by the Kent Law School. The author would like to thank Peter Goodrich for his comments
on this paper and his support for its publication. Professor Goodrich's own knowledge
and insights into the history and epistemology of the civil and common law traditions are
immensely valuable. The author would also like to thank the Journal's anonymous
referees for their helpful criticisms.
1 D. Vick, `Interdisciplinarity and the Discipline of Law' (2004) 31 J. of Law and
Society 163, at 191.
`legal research too rarely involves meaningful encounters with other
disciplines' and this may be due to the fact that `lawyers are bad com-
municators because they tend to be pushy know-it-alls'. However Vick goes
on to assert that, despite these personality issues, law as an academic
discipline may not in itself be the problem. The professional orientation of
academic law encourages law graduates `not to be as specialized in their
training as the members of other disciplines' and this `can be a good back-
ground for preparing one to engage in collaborative work'.
2
The purpose of
this article is to examine some of these claims about law as a discipline and
to ask two broad questions. Why has law proved such a stable discipline?
And has this stability been achieved at a price that is now threatening the
discipline with philosophical and epistemological bankruptcy?
INTRODUCTION
Douglas Vick's observations are interesting in that they raise questions not
just about the nature of disciplines and their ability to survive but also about
legal education and scholarship and the value of this education and
scholarship in the context of the sciences and social sciences in general.
Now, if one looks back over the history of the civil law tradition ± a tradition
as old as the universities themselves
3
± one can see that the influence of
other disciplines on the methods of jurists have been varied and fundamental.
Yet law has managed to retain both its independence and, it would seem, its
ability to appear `intellectually rigid, inflexible, and inward looking'.
4
Indeed it would seem to some outside the discipline to be a subject that has
little to contribute to social science epistemology.
5
Consequently the
question arises as to whether the writer is correct to be optimistic about law
being a discipline that might encourage its graduates to be good inter-
disciplinarians. Could it not be said that much legal education and
scholarship functions within a methodological and paradigm framework
that tends to encourage rigidity and introspection rather than an open-minded
attitude to academic methods and pursuits? This is an important question to
pursue but one might ask, at least impliedly, a further one. Should social
scientists take law, as it has been constructed by its history, seriously as a
modern intellectual discipline?
Of course there are many individuals working within law faculties ±
particularly within the common law world ± whose own scholarship is now
earning the respect of social scientists in general. To make sweeping
432
2 id., p. 192. Emphasis in the original.
3 J.A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession (2008) 221±44.
4 Vick, op. cit, n. 1, p. 164.
5 See G. Samuel, `Is Law Really a Social Science? A View from Comparative Law'
(2008) 67 Cambridge Law J. 288.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
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