Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Law : A theoretical analysis
Résumé
Current discussions on law’s methodology are marked with (relatively) new concerns about the necessity to
include other disciplines in legal practice and in scientific legal research. As the invitation letter for this
Conference suggests, three different levels are, at least, involved in the debate. a) The first one regards the
contribution of other disciplines as a way to find better answers to practical legal questions or disputes. b) The
second one regards the ways in which law, as an academic discipline, benefits from a cross-disciplinary
perspective. c) The third one is mainly oriented on legal education. This paper focuses on the second level.
Cross-disciplinary perspective to law is becoming a major topic in legal literature. Noting the failure of
traditional legal methodologies to grasp the complexity of modern law, viewed as “law in context”, numerous
authors are promoting new disciplinary approaches. However, they do not necessarily agree on the concepts
to be used to describe or to prescribe an articulation between different scientific disciplines.
Through an analytical method, this paper’s purpose is to identify and clarify some of the different
epistemologies concerning the ways to connect legal science and other disciplines. Therefore, it aims at
presenting the main concepts and typologies used to address the problem of the articulation of various fields of
knowledge and associated methodologies, as well as their critics and limits. The issue of integrating other
social sciences into legal science is related to central themes in legal theory. Thus, some developments will be
made, for instance, about the definition of law as a scientific objet, the “correct” point of view to give an
account of law, the possible specificity of legal approach, the conditions for producing a scientific discourse,
the role and function of the legal researcher, and the interaction between the law and the social.