Title: The Transatlantic Divergence in Legal Thought: American Law and Economics vs. German Doctrinalism
Abstract: Law and economics has become an integral part of U.S. legal scholarship and the law school curriculum. Ever since the legal realist movement, scholars mostly view the law an external perspective. It may be surprising to many in the U.S. that European legal scho-larship has been largely resistant to this development. Law is typically viewed from the in-side, that is as an autonomous discipline independent the other social sciences. Most legal scholarship is doctrinal, meaning that legal scholars employ interpretative methods in order to systematically expose the law and to find out what the law is, frequently even before it is tackled by a court. U.S.-style legal scholarship is often considered very alien, and law and economics in particular often meets outright rejection.
In this paper, we attempt to explain this divergence in the academic legal discourse us-ing the reception of law and economics in legal scholarship in German-speaking countries as a case in point. However, we suspect that our approach can be generalized to other parts of Europe because of common roots and similar historical factors that can be identified in many parts of Europe.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-05-27
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 34
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