The Future of European Legal Scholarship: Empirical Jurisprudence
Dyevre, Arthur, Wessel Wijtvliet, and Nicolas Lampach. "The future of European legal scholarship: Empirical jurisprudence." Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 26.3 (2019): 348-371.
24 Pages Posted: 10 Oct 2017 Last revised: 2 Jun 2021
Date Written: October 10, 2017
Abstract
To avert the twin threats of isolation and marginalization, we argue that European legal research should focus on questions that are important to lawyers and legal reformers and fully embrace the methodology of the social sciences. We identify two research programmes that, we believe, should be of fundamental interest to members of the legal community at large: (1) law as the art of persuasion, and (2) law as social product and instrument of social planning. We show that the questions demarcated by these two research programmes are, and have always been, of interest to lawyers, claims to the autonomy of the legal discipline notwithstanding. We also argue that the rapidly expanding and increasingly eclectic array of empirical research techniques—from text-mining to network analysis and machine learning—makes the turn to Empirical Jurisprudence especially promising.
Keywords: Empirical Jurisprudence, European Legal Research, Methodology
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