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Introduction

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User-friendly Legal Science

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Abstract

Normal legal science has not been able to prevail in the competition for scientific hegemony. Moreover, normal legal science is less practice ready than it could be. User-friendly Legal Science is a legal discipline designed to help. Its unique point of view is how users can use legal tools and practices to reach their objectives in different contexts. While normal legal science focuses on legal norms, User-friendly Legal Science primarily studies behaviour.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kant I (1783), § 1.

  2. 2.

    Kant I (1793), p. 61.

  3. 3.

    Bacon F (1620), book I, aphorism 81: “Meta autem scientiarum vera et legitima non alia est, quam ut dotetur vita humana noviis inventis et copiis.”

  4. 4.

    von Kirchmann J (1848), p. 23: “As science takes the arbitrary as its object, it becomes arbitrary itself; three corrective words from the legislator, and entire libraries turn into maculature.”

  5. 5.

    Hart HLA (1961/ 2012), pp. 88–90.

  6. 6.

    von Savigny FC (1814).

  7. 7.

    Ehrlich E (1913), pp. 382–383.

  8. 8.

    Heck P (1914); Stigler GJ (1971).

  9. 9.

    For legal rhetoric, see White JB (2002), p. 1399; Perelman C (1977); Gast W (2015). For the effect of psychological types, see Novak M (2014).

  10. 10.

    von Kirchmann J (1848); von Jhering R (1858); Larenz K (1966), p. 11; Ulen TS (2002).

  11. 11.

    History was defined as the frame of reference even in von Jhering R (1858), pp. 75–76: “Denn die Geschichte selber ist, wie Hegel gesagt hat, das Weltgericht; die Sünden der Väter strafen sich an den Kindern, und wer in der Geschichte suchen will, was gut und böse, der wird es erkennen können an dem Segen, der auch hier auf der guten, und dem Fluch, der auf der bösen Tat ruht.” Hegel GWF (1820/1821), § 343: “Die Geschichte des Geistes ist seine Tat, denn er ist nur, was er tut …”

  12. 12.

    See already Holmes OW (1897).

  13. 13.

    Kuhn TS (1970).

  14. 14.

    For the problematic relationship between legal theory and practice, see, for example, Posner RA (2002), p. 1316; Jestaedt M (2006).

  15. 15.

    Goodhart CAE (1997).

  16. 16.

    See Grundmann S, Micklitz HW, Renner M (eds) (2015); van Gestel R, Micklitz HW, Rubin EL (eds) (2016).

  17. 17.

    Holmes OW (1897), p. 469; Posner RA (2002), p. 1317; LoPucki LM (2016), pp. 506 and 538.

  18. 18.

    Sieber U (2010), p. 171.

  19. 19.

    Maslow AH (1966), p. 15: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” See also Hayek FA (1944); Glendon MA (1991); Epstein RA (1992); Teubner G (2012). For an alternative to mandatory law, see, for example, Thaler RH, Sunstein CR (2008).

  20. 20.

    See Posner RA (2002), pp. 1315 and 1323.

  21. 21.

    Mäntysaari P (2013).

  22. 22.

    See, for example, Iggers GG (1988) on the paradigm of historical science. For the need to choose new reference points, see Latour B (2013) pp. 29–30.

  23. 23.

    White JB (2002), p. 1397: “You learn the law in order to use it – in order to achieve a set of objectives, to establish and maintain a set of relations, to move yourself and others in a direction you wish to go, even to discover that direction.” For examples of legal “framing devices” and “referencing devices”, see Malloy RP (2004), pp. 6–8.

  24. 24.

    Wittgenstein L (1953), § 1 and § 43.

  25. 25.

    For sociology, see Weber M (1922). For other examples of the use of an interpretive approach in law, see Malloy RP (2004), pp. 56–57 and Grundmann S, Micklitz HW, Renner M (eds) (2015), p. 3.

  26. 26.

    Simon HA (1967), pp. 14–15; van Aken JE (2004).

  27. 27.

    For the pattern model of explanation, see Kaplan A (1964).

  28. 28.

    In qualitative research, it is customary to use grounded theory. See Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1967), p. 18.

  29. 29.

    See, for example, Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1967), p. 3.

  30. 30.

    Kant I (1793), p. 61: “… a middle term is required between theory and practice …” Edwards HT (1992–1993), p. 34: “While the schools are moving toward pure theory, the (law) firms are moving toward pure commerce, and the middle ground – ethical practice – has been deserted by both.”

  31. 31.

    Lewin K (1945), p. 129.

  32. 32.

    van Aken JE (2004), p. 220.

  33. 33.

    For economics, see Friedman M (1953), p. 15.

  34. 34.

    Hydén H (2011), p. 122: “To put it in a nutshell, how does one get from ‘is’ to ‘ought’? … Within the system under investigation, there is an in-built, taken for granted rationality that decides what is right and what is wrong.” According to what is known as Hume’s guillotine, it is not obvious how one can coherently move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Hume D (1739), book III, part I, section I.

  35. 35.

    Banakar R (2006), p. 78: “I argue, therefore, that legal scholars can break new grounds once they turn outwards, for only if they step outside law, they can view their undertaking in different, and perhaps new, lights.”

  36. 36.

    See also Hart HLA (1961/ 2012), p. 40 on the “puzzled man”; White JB (2002), p. 1397; Banakar R, Travers M (2005b), p. 134.

  37. 37.

    For example, legal concepts can be regarded as “ideal-types” that can be made subject to an empirical investigation. Weber M (1949), p. 43 (a translation of Weber M 1913). For legal history, see Lobban M (2012), paragraph 29: “One of the tasks of the legal historian speaking to a wider historical audience is to remind them that the language which lawyers and legal officials use, and the operation of their institutions play a crucial part in the governance of society and in structuring private relations.” For the traditional view, however, see Ross A (1958), p. 34.

  38. 38.

    von Wright GH (1971), p. 96. See, for example, Kusch N (2003), p. 350.

  39. 39.

    Ross A (1958), pp. 331 and 328; Bourdieu P (1975), p. 19; Simon HA (1967), p. 15. Basedow J (2014): “What is often denounced as a wave of neo-liberalism that has flooded the world has in reality ensued from a mix of economic, political and comparative legal investigations.”

  40. 40.

    For innovation and the constructive approach, see Kasanen E, Lukka K, Siitonen A (1993), p. 246.

  41. 41.

    Compare Ross A (1958), p. 334 on legal politics as a science: “… the principle of purity of science requires, that every political directive shall name the objectives and attitudes which are accepted as hypothetical premises guiding the theoretical researches and the practical conclusions …” Critically on Ross’ science Dalberg-Larsen J (2005), p. 47.

  42. 42.

    Grundmann S, Micklitz HW, Renner M (eds) (2015), p. 4: “Von der Übersetzungsleistung der Rechtstheorie kann die Rechtsdogmatik profitieren: Sie kann sich mit Hilfe der Rechtstheorie ein genaueres Bild der gesellschaftlichen Kontexte Machen, in denen Rechtsregeln wirken.”

  43. 43.

    Dagan H (2011), p. xviii: “For legal realists, the profound and inescapable reason for doctrinal indeterminacy is the availability of multiple and potentially applicable doctrinal sources.” Berman HJ (1983), p. 11: “The conventional concept of law as a body of rules derived from statutes and court decisions … is wholly inadequate to support a study of a transnational legal culture.”

  44. 44.

    For management accounting theory, see Kasanen E, Lukka K, Siitonen A (1993), p. 252: “Truly functioning constructions have great commercial value.”

  45. 45.

    Dewey J (1938), Chapter 1; Saurama E, Julkunen I (2012), p. 61: “What Dewey wanted to do was to restore the value of the needs of practical life in the field of knowledge formation; although practice is uncertain, chaotic and volatile, it is nevertheless the reality within which people have to solve the problems they face.” See also Simon HA (1967), p. 15 (on the organisational problem of professional schools); van Aken JE (2004), p. 219 (management research and business schools).

  46. 46.

    See, for example, Banakar R, Travers M (2005a), p. 19.

  47. 47.

    For interpretive management accounting research, see Elharidy AM, Nicholson B, Scapens RW (2008), p. 142. For legal history, see Duss V (2012), p. 989.

  48. 48.

    See also Kaplan A (1964), § 1, p. 3.

  49. 49.

    Hart HLA (1961/2012), pp. 88–90.

  50. 50.

    Alf Ross divided the science of law into, first, legal dogmatics or jurisprudence that studies legal norms and, second, the sociology of law that studies law in action. See Ross A (1958), § 4; Dalberg-Larsen J (2005), p. 41.

  51. 51.

    Bourdieu P (1975), pp. 38–39.

  52. 52.

    Kuhn TS (1970), Chapter 6.

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  1. Department of Accounting and Commercial Law, Hanken School of Economics, Vaasa, Finland

    Petri Mäntysaari

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Mäntysaari, P. (2017). Introduction. In: User-friendly Legal Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53492-3_1

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