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Artikel 3: Sanne Taekema Relative autonomy. A characterisation of the discipline of

law.

- 3 karakteristieken van juridisch onderzoek: gericht op de praktijk, een internperspectief en gebruik van de hermeneutische methode. Redenen

1) Studenten worden voor specifieke beroepen opgeleid (advocaten, rechters,notarissen), Het publiek voor wie het onderzoek is geschreven, is de professionelewereld en zowel het onderzoek als de beroepsbeoefening wordt vaak door dezelfde

personen gedaan. Daardoor ontstaat een specifiek type onderzoek, een commentaar

op het bestaande recht.

Dit leidt to twee kenmerken van juridisch onderzoek: Het onderzoek is zowel

beschrijvend als normatief, eerst het construeren van de doctrine en daarna het

doen van aanbevelingen. Daarnaast wordt het onderzoek benvloed/getriggerd door

ontwikkelingen in de rechtspraktijk en daarnaast leidt het onderzoek zelf ook weer

tot ontwikkelingen.

2) Onderzoekers delen hetzelfde gezichtspunt als de beoefenaars van het recht. Dit iseen intern gezichtspunt en het gaat hierbij om het verstehen van het recht. Een

extern gezichtspunt (bijvoorbeeld door sociologen) leidt tot erklaren van het recht.Dit is het verschil tussen de observant en de deelnemer van een rechtssysteem

(Hart).

3) De rechtswetenschapper houdt zich bezig met het hermeneutisch interpreteren vanteksten. Het verschil met het hermeneutisch lezen in andere onderzoeken is dat de

rechtswetenschapper de tekst dient toe te passen in de praktijk. 3 elementen om

rekening mee te houden: de tekst zelf, de auteur van de tekst (wat is zijn intentie en

de context) en de lezer van de tekst. Iedereen leest de tekst met eigen vooroordelen,

door interpretatie ontstaat een nieuwe betekenis waardoor de horizon van de lezer

wordt verbreed.

- Het recht kan worden gezien als een op zichzelf staande wetenschap vanwege deeigen begrippen, regels, waarden enz. Het is echter ook verbonden met andere

domeinen, het regelt activiteiten in allerlei praktijkgebieden en de begrippen

refereren altijd naar waarden uit andere praktijkgebieden. = relatief autonoom.

Rechtswetenschappelijk onderzoek is ten eerste relatief autonoom omdat het

inbreng vereist uit andere disciplines om alle principes, theorien en concepten van

het recht te begrijpen. Daarnaast wordt de relevantie van rechtswetenschappelijk

onderzoek afgemeten aan de hand van de praktische bijdrage aan het recht. Daarom

moeten de resultaten en argumenten worden gepresenteerd op een manier dat

iedere deelnemer aan het rechtssysteem ze kan begrijpen en gebruiken.

Article 7: A. Watson - The importance of nutshells- Nutshells: books written as teaching manuals for beginning law students or to

instruct non-lawyers in the elements of the law. Importance: They demonstrate the

easy transmissibility of legal rules, institutions, concepts and structures from one

society to other, very different, ones. They also indicate the frequent longevity of

such rules. Thirdly, their very success is attributable to the lack of interest by

governments in law-making, or in inserting particular messages into their

legislation. Fourth, the importance of private Nutshells is evidence of the states lack

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of concern for communicating law to its subjects. Fifth, they show that in large

measure law does not emerge in any real sense form a society in which it operates.

Roman law

- The vehicles of legal change were the jurists to whom also much of the developmentof the praetors Edict must be credited. Justinians Intitutes are law in a nutshell; ateaching manual for first year students which was also published as the law of the

land. The Institutes are based on the work of Gaius Institutes.

The reception

- The most important event in western legal development from the later eleventhcentury, was the reception of Roman law. The Institutes became both the gateway to

knowledge of the law, and also the organizing instrument of the developing systems.

It was the basic text for beginning law students throughout Europe for hundreds of

years, and gave them their concepts and structures.

- Hundreds of Institutes of local law were published throughout Western Europe.They are very similar to Justinians Institutes. They deal only with legal topics thatare dealt with in the Institutes, they do deal with all topics dealt with in the

Institutes, with the frequent exclusions of criminal law and procedure. They

portrayed the local law with a coherent structure, they tended to fill gaps in the local

law and they could have an enormous impact on training the young.

Blackstone

- England did not succumb to the Reception, English law was based on case law andstatute. This made it especially hard to make the law systematic, thus it was hard to

build up or set out clearly and adequately the topic of law under consideration. To

create a system became the task of text-book writers, and especially of Nutshell

writers. Blackstones Commentaries on the Law of England casted English law intoa structure that was systematic, largely satisfactory, and both usable and used as an

organizing principle.

- The commentaries had an enormous impact on the development of American law.The success of English common law in America is virtually unthinkable without it.

Blackstone was also Americas Nutshell.

The French Code Civil

- Most important codification movement in Europe from the eighteenth centuryonward started in France, with the Code Civil as leading legal system. ArgousInstitution au droit francais comes the closest to a nutshell in this period.

Conclusions

- To Watson, the role of nutshells cannot be over exaggerated. It was a nutshell thatprovided the only systematic structure in classical Roman law. A statutory nutshell,

based on that one, provided the only systematic part of the Byzantine compilation of

the emperor Justinian I. Blackstones Nutshell created a system that did not exist inthe labyrinthine swamp of English law. That nutshell greatly facilitated the

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acceptance of English common law in the U.S. -> Law in a western world without

Nutshells would be unrecognizable by us. Reasons:

1) Private nutshells have filled a void caused by the lack of interest on the part ofgovernments and the principal subordinate law-makers to systematize the law,

far less to communicate it in an approachable form.

2)

In a complex society, the law is complicated. It can be readily understood only ifsimplified, and the interactions of the various branches of the law and the

structures of the law become apparent only after this simplification.

3) Nutshells introduce beginners to law. As a result they determine forever thepattern and parameters of the lawyers thought.

- Typically, nutshells have an impact elsewhere and later than their place and time ofwriting. Casebooks cannot fulfill the role of nutshells: they are insufficiently

systematic and do not set out the legal rules. Nutshells play a central, unrecognized,

part in legal education.

- Various factors explain the failure to recognize Nutshells as being among theparamount factors in legal development:

1) Scholars regard nutshells as beneath notice2) Scholars generally work with one legal system and are unaware that a particularfeature in that system is prominent in many others, and has a general

significance.

3) Nutshells have an impact elsewhere and later than their place and time ofwriting.

Article 8: LeGrand - The impossibility of legal transplants

- A legal transplant is the transfer that occurs across jurisdictions: there is somethingin a given jurisdiction that is not native to it and that has been brought there from

another. The legal is reduced to rules which are conventionally understood to

mean statutory instruments and judicial decisions. -> the moving of a rule from onecountry to another.

- Change in the law is independent from the workings of any social, historical, orcultural substratum; it is rather a function of rules being imported from another

legal system. Comparative legal studies is about legal transplants which themselves

are about legal rules, in the main statutory rules, considered in isolation from

society.

- Watson: Law is rules and only that, and rules are bare propositional statements andonly that. These rules travel across jurisdictions and because rules are not socially

connected in any meaningful way, differences in historical factors and habits ofthought do not limit or qualify their transplantability.

- Objections of the author (legrand): Law is a autonomous entity unencumbered byhistorical, epistemological, or cultural baggage. How could law travel if it was not

segregated from society? Rules are just not what they are represented as being by

Watson. Rules cannot travel and accordingly, legal transplants are impossible.

- The meaning of a rule is an essential component of the rule; it partakes in theruleness of the rule. The meaning is not entirely supplied by the rule itself; a rule is

never completely self-explanatory. The meaning of the rule is, accordingly, a function

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of the interpreters epistemological assumptions which are themselves historically

and culturally conditioned (vgl. Hermeneutische vor-verstandnis).

- A significant part of the emotional and intellectual investment used in theinterpretation of a rule is unable to be appreciated empirically. An interpretation is

always a subjective product and that product is necessarily a cultural product. The

interpretation is the result of a particular understanding of the rule that isconditioned by a series of factors which would be different if the interpretation had

occurred in another place or time. The interpretation that prevails is a function of

epistemic conventions produced as the result of power struggles that are themselves

non-epistemic. Other interpretations would also have promoted understanding of

the rule if they had been adopted, albeit not in the same way.

- It is more accurate to think of an interpretation as an intersubjective phenomenon inthe sense that it is the product of the interpreters subjectivity as it interacts with thenetwork of all subjectivities within an interpretive community which, over time, is

fundamentally constitutive for that communitys articulated values and sustains thatcommunitys cultural identity.

- There is more to ruleness than a series of inscribed words which is to say that a ruleis not identical to the inscribed words.1) A rule is necessarily an incorporative cultural form. As an accretion of cultural

elements, it is supported by impressive historical and ideological formations.

Because a rule exists in a larger cognitive framework, the comparatist must relate

it to other phenomena in a way that will make the particular proposition look

less like an arbitrary event and more like the manifestation of a relatively

coherent and intelligible whole. -> the rule becomes the unknowing articulator of

a cultural sensibility.

- If accepted that a rule receives its meaning from without, a meaningful legaltransplant only occurs when both the propositional statement as such and its

meaning are transported from one culture to another. It is difficult to conceive howthis could happen, given that the meaning is cultural-specific. The meaning does not

survive the journey from one legal system to another. The imported form of words is

inevitably ascribed a different, local meaning which makes it a different rule. The

imported form of words is inevitably ascribed a different, local meaning which

makes itipso facto a different rule.

- Watson: Roman rules were generally accepted in France. LeGrand: culturalconstructions of reality and of law and of rules would harbor certain distinctive

characteristics whcin would, therefore, affect the interpretation of a rule, that is,

which would determine the ruleness of the rule according to the distinctive cultural

logics of the native systems. These rules are, therefore, not the same rules. At best,

what can be displace from one jurisdiction to another is, literally, a meaningless formof words.

- What is at issue here is a rhetorical strategy involving the ordinary act of repetitionas an enabling discursive method. To say that change in law is in large part driven by

mimesis is to say that individuals will turn to the past to help them construct the

present. This is as evident in law as it is in literature or mathematics.

- The notion of legal transplant is used as a convenient variance reducer. Theproponents of legal-change-as-legal-transplants offer what can be described as a

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synthetic vision focusing exclusively on the technical level of the law. It creates a

false consensus which can only be established through exclusive reference to the

formalized elements of the object under discussion.

- Comparative legal studies is best regarded as the hermeneutic explication andmediation of different forms of legal experience within a descriptive and critical

metalanguage. The comparatist must never abolish the distance between self andother. Defining a legal culture or tradition for the comparatist means, therefore,

finding what is significant in its difference from others.

- Comparison must not have a unifying but a multiplying effect: it must aim toorganize the diversity of discourses around different (cultural) forms and counter

the tendency of the mind toward uniformization. Comparative legal studies can

further our understanding of other peoples by shedding light on how they

understand their law. But, unless the comparatists can learn to think of law as a

culturally-situated phenomenon and accept that the law lives in a profound way

within a culture-specific discourse, comparison rapidly becomes a pointless venture.