Political Concepts Beyond Disciplines: A Research Agenda of Democratic Global Legal Science

Law struggles with recognition as science. While acknowledged as a practice, craft or art, even some legal scholars contest the understanding of law as science. This paper sets out a research agenda studying how the alienation of law from the domain of ‘science’ fuels a narrower understanding of both concepts, and obfuscates attempts to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries, shaped particularly by US-centric social sciences of the 20^th century. The paper explores how, when law is perceived as ‘unscientific’, distinct from the more neatly delineated domains of knowledge (including sociology), the understanding of science itself narrows down to allegedly value-free, typically theory-testing research, illustrated by academic journals claiming not to be restricted on a disciplinary basis, yet encouraging a standardized structure where theory precedes methods and results in a theory-testing fashion.

The proliferation of notions of ‘interdisciplinarity’, while generative for collaborations, rarely alters the disciplinary anchoring of knowledge production, as materialized in the organization of academic institutions into faculties and departments. A considerable portion of ‘legal scholars’ is not innocent in this alienation. Doctrinal scholarship, when leaving no space for other ways of legal knowledge generation, stifles communication with scholars thinking about ‘living law’. On the other hand, empirical legal studies, when embracing positivist social science, may succeed to appeal to knowledge consumers beyond law, but alienate doctrinal scholars. Identifying the risk of undermining of both scientific and legal authority via such alienation, this paper asks instead how a focus on overarching political concepts instead of disciplines might help remedy the gap, when the study of concepts allows for non-dominating, democratic, yet disciplined engagement beyond discipline. Ultimately, the paper calls for surveying the capacity of existing approaches and institutions of ‘legal knowledge production’ to contribute to such an endeavour. Such surveys should prioritize decolonial approaches emerging from more diverse environments.