• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    The New Scientism in Legal Scholarship: A Comment on Clark and Posner, in Symposium: "Legal Scholarship: Its Nature and Purposes"

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    New_Scientism_in_Legal_Scholar ...
    Size:
    693.8Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Priest, George
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/4951
    Abstract
    Professor Clark's paper is surely the most self-consciously scientific of those delivered at the symposium. In aspiration it resembles the work of Professor Posner, who is famous for his contributions to the scientific study of the legal system. The approach of these scholars exemplifies a growing adoption of the scientific style in legal scholarship. Although social scientists have occasionally addressed subjects relating to the law, their interest in the legal system typically has been tangential. In contrast, this modem legal scholarship boldly attempts a comprehensive examination of the institutions of the law with the methods of the sciences. Most prominent is the work of what is now a substantial group of scholars, led by Professor Posner, who contend that the universe of common law rules exhibits a single scientific regularity: the rules are, in the terms of economics, efficient. Professor Clark's charge to us is equally ambitious. He would have us examine the development over time of all legal doctrines in terms of the biological process of evolution. The attraction of the scientific method, of course, is the seeming precision and power that it brings to analysis of the legal system. Scientific propositions, as Professor Clark frequently informs us, are "testable." They can be confirmed or refuted, unlike the invocation of (often personal) values that is characteristic of ordinary legal scholarship. Science offers the legal world the possibility of consensus once "general laws of [legal] change" are discovered. In this Comment I argue that the contribution of this modem work to our understanding of the legal system is greatly exaggerated. A very large proportion of this work is scientistic and, in essence, alien to the sciences from which it seems to derive. More generally, I believe, the aim to construct a comprehensive theory of legal doctrines—whether economic or biological—represents, in our present state of knowledge, a perversion of the scientific enterprise. In this respect, the scientific methods of Professors Clark and Posner are similar and bear closer examination.
    Collections
    Faculty Scholarship Series

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.