On Methodology in Law

The other days, I was talking to an American Professor of law. He said that during his academic life, he has failed to find a serious legal work in (contract, corporate, and financial) law written by a European legal scholar. In his opinion, in 1930s American legal scholarship stopped doing what European legal scholars are currently doing. And I could not but agree with him. 

Legal scholarship badly suffers from the lack of method(ology). When I compare the seminars I am attending in economics and finance with the ones I am attending in law, the latter seems to me the unintelligible utterances coming from clouded minds. Of course, economics and finance are the most progressive disciplines of social sciences, perhaps because many of their subject matters lend themselves to scientific or quasi-scientific methods. This, unfortunately, is not always the case in law, and expecting the legal scholarship to accommodate such methodologies would be too demanding.

To our regret, not only did the traditional legal scholarship failed to be inspired by the methodologies used in other disciplines such as economics and finance, but also it failed to develop a methodology of its own. Worst of all, some European legal scholars grew deeply pessimistic towards law and economics that tries to employ the methodologies used in economics to analyze legal phenomena. However, despite their deep skepticism towards law and economics, when they are asked for better alternative methods for analyzing legal issues, they seem to be miserably clueless.

A discipline without a methodology is arcane, boring, and, if I may say so, nonsense. As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”