1 - Methodology

Summary

Reflection on the law gives rise to many methodological questions. Some relate to legal doctrines – how best to understand, rationalise and potentially justify areas such as contract law or administrative law or criminal procedure. This chapter, by contrast, will focus on the question of how to understand ‘law in general’, or the ‘nature of law’. Law in this sense is standardly regarded as a particular type of social practice with two dimensions: an institutional dimension involving bodies such as legislatures and courts, and a normative dimension involving the standards and other considerations created and applied by those bodies (‘the law’). How should we go about making sense of this social practice? In what way should it be approached? There are three prominent features of our contemporary understanding of law that feed into the methodological debate: (a) the idea that law is a general type of social practice, found in different cultures at different times; (b) the idea that law is a social construction, whose existence depends upon the combined beliefs and actions of a variety of social actors; and (c) the idea that law is a hermeneutic practice, that is, a practice that we self-consciously understand as a distinctive sort of social practice, and in terms of which we understand and structure features of our social world.