3 - Legal Praxeology: Into Perspective and into Practice

Summary

Legal praxeology is the perspective that claims to consider the law through the practices that take the same law as their point of reference. It occupies the space that exists between formalism and sociologism. Legal praxeology is the approach that takes law seriously in all its formal and sociological depth. This means that it considers absurd the pretention of dealing with law while ignoring what its practitioners take as essential to their activities, that is, the rules; but it finds it equally indispensable to deal with these rules and the activities that refer to them through their modes of accomplishment. Legal praxeology does not aspire to theorizing, if the latter is understood as the search for abstract generalization in which to subsume the infinite variety of cases. Particular cases are studied ethnographically in order to elicit the mechanisms that are specific to how they unfold, including what is linked to the law as followed by both its professional and lay practitioners. Legal praxeology’s descriptive attention is concerned with the methods proper to the people concerned. One could speak of an interest in “legal ethnomethods.”