Articles for category: Prospects of Legal Scholarship

A Double Plea for International Opening and More Strongly Interlinked Multidisciplinarity

The German Council of Sciences and Humanities calls for an international opening and a legal science that is more strongly linked to its neighbouring disciplines. Both requests merit support – if they are considered as part of a development of the existing legal education, rather than a revolutionary request that overturns the current system in Germany. I. The Survey’s Main Theses Both of the central theses put forward by the German Council of Science and Humanities (henceforth Wissenschaftsrat) in a survey on ‚Perspectives of Jurisprudence in Germany‘ apply to research and teaching alike: The Wissenschaftsrat starts from the finding that ... continue reading

30. Juni 2014

Ein doppeltes Plädoyer für internationale Öffnung und stärker vernetzte Interdisziplinarität

Der Wissenschaftsrat ruft in seinem Gutachten zu den “Perspektiven der Rechtswissenschaft in Deutschland” dazu auf, die Rechtswissenschaft sowohl international als auch mit Blick auf die Nachbarwissenschaften zu öffnen. Beide Forderungen verdienen dann Unterstützung, wenn sie als Weiterentwicklung, nicht als revolutionäre Forderung zum Umsturz des bestehenden Systems verstanden werden.

30. Juni 2014

Translating Ideas

Picking up some of the threads of the current debate on this blog, I would like to focus on an aspect that to my mind is of crucial importance in the matter: the necessity of translation. What I mean by that will hopefully become clear in the course of the following three steps: First I would like to argue why and in what sense doctrinal scholarship is (or at least can be) at the very core of law. In a second step I would like to explain why – therefore and nevertheless – it needs interdisciplinarity and internationalization/comparative legal studies. ... continue reading

28. Februar 2014

Poor Prospects for Internationalization: Germans and Americans in Law Faculties Jenseits des Atlantiks

Introduction For all the noise it makes about internationalizing German legal scholarship, the Council’s Report only makes a feeble pass at the deeply parochial culture that dominates the German legal academy. One of the gravest consequences of that parochialism is the exclusion of foreign legal scholars from Germany’s law faculties. This, in turn, undermines other attempts at internationalizing German legal scholarship. I hope to illustrate the extent of this problem with a survey that shows how few American jurists are teaching in Germany and how many Germans have succeeded in becoming law professors in America. Globalizing Legal Education The German ... continue reading

26. Februar 2014

Wissenschaftsrat in Wonderland

Had the German Wissenschaftsrat hired an advertising agency to extol the virtues and challenges of German legal education at the dawn of the 21st century, the publicist could hardly have done a more positive job than the Wissenschaftsrat itself. Its report signals that all is remarkably well with the state of legal education and research in Germany: there are more chairs than ever, and those chairs attract more research funding than ever before. German legal scholarship is internationalizing, and coming to terms with the increasing juridification of society and deformalization of law. All is great. Of course, all could be ... continue reading

25. Februar 2014

Expanding the Legal Curriculum: Rethinking the Teaching of Law

What is striking to an outsider about the focus of German legal scholarship is the extent to which it centres on a canonical and dogmatic approach to the interpretation of law. This emerges very clearly from the report prepared by the German Council of Science and Humanities and translated under the auspices of the programme Rechtskulturen. At the same time, there is recognition of the need to develop legal scholarship beyond these frames of reference to engage law in a wider system of higher education and academic research. This not only requires a rethinking of the curricular design to allow ... continue reading

24. Februar 2014

Courage to be wrong, or education to get it right? A response to Michaela Hailbronner

Michaela Hailbronner makes important arguments in her informed and carefully balanced post. I agree with much of what she says. I just think the main problem of interdisciplinarity in Germany is not lack of courage. It is lack of expertise. Much of her analysis strikes me as sound. I would agree that many US law professors have few scruples to write on topics and in areas about which they know very little. But regardless of whether one finds that refreshing or annoying, I do not think it is a relevant factor in the creation of scholarly knowledge. I also think ... continue reading

23. Februar 2014

On the courage to be wrong

The debate on the Wissenschaftsrat-Report has quickly turned into one about the comparative advantages of German doctrinal vs. US interdisciplinary legal scholarship and education. This is not surprising because much of the Report reads like a recommendation to go further down the American path, while at the same time still taking doctrine seriously – very seriously indeed. In taking this ‘middle path’, the authors seek to take the best of what are two very different academic worlds. This effort is admirable, but I am skeptical about its prospects. The attempt itself stems, I think, from a deeper dilemma that has ... continue reading

22. Februar 2014

Free Trade in Legal Scholarship?

I want to decline Rob Howse’s invitation to talk about my own residual anxieties, because he introduces another more interesting theme into the debate: whether scholarship can actually be traded between countries. He suggests that such trade exists, though apparently only in one direction: “It is not as if Americans are going to buy their doctrinal scholarship from Germany […]; on the other hand, some forms of interdisciplinary scholarship from the US may well be exportable to Germany.” But it was not always so. There was a time, prior to World War I, when many Americans were indeed eager to ... continue reading

22. Februar 2014