Law as a Human Science

Law as a Human Science argues for the reintroduction of crucial aspects of the humanist tradition in legal thinking. Interdisciplinary studies of law are now primarily understood as policy-oriented and socio-legal in their orientation; whilst the older ties between law and the humanities (with philosophy, history, rhetoric, etc.) have become more marginal academic curiosities. This book makes a renewed case for law as a human science, by investigating the development of modern law as an academic discipline in relation to both the social scientific and hermeneutical traditions. The former ΓÇô more Anglophone ΓÇô approach associates law with an instrumental notion of knowledge and science: legal knowledge can be exploited both as a practitioner''s tool and to provide potentially workable solutions to social problems. In contrast, the hermeneutic ΓÇô and more Continental ΓÇô approach situates law among the human sciences. This makes the instrumentalisation of legal knowledge difficult, if not impossible. But it is this approach that Panu Minkkinen defends here, in a radicalisation of lawΓÇÖs traditional affiliations with the human sciences. The ΓÇÿhermeneutical legal academicΓÇÖ, he argues, provides not only a renewed basis for seeing law as a human science, but also a new foundation for understanding it as an essentially critical enterprise.