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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Methods of Legal Science (France)

Résumé

There is no French method of legal science. It is certainly possible to identify dominant methodological orientations characterizing some long historical periods. However, these orientations have been followed by criticism and dissent, in order to renew the legal analysis by adapting it to socioeconomic developments or by opening it to other social sciences, or to justify and consolidate the emergence and the autonomy of new legal branches in respect to the hegemony of civil law (administrative law, criminal law, labor law…). These critics are in minority in the field of French legal studies, but they contribute to confer it a relative methodological heterogeneity. Nevertheless, the theorization of legal methods ceased around the middle of 1920s. After the Second World War, the legal scholars became less attentive to this question. It is more explored by legal historians, theorists, or sociologists, but the latter two are marginalized in the French academic field. It is here impossible to be exhaustive on the diverse methodological trends in France (for more explanation, see V.Champeil-Desplats, Méthodologies du droit et des sciences du droit, Paris, Dalloz, collection Méthode juridique, 2022; “The French Legal Dogmatic Method and Its Critics around the 19th–20th Centuries” (Chap. V), in D. Bunikowski (ed.), Historical and Philosophical Foundations of European Legal Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, pp. 137–154). But it is possible to elaborate a historical reconstruction from the beginning of the nineteenth century, a crucial historical moment when, as it is well-known, the Civil Code was drafted and the so-called School of Exegesis flourished. “So-called,” because today several specialists of this historical moment are underlining the relativity of the unity, in space and time, of the authors identified within this School (P. Jestaz, C. Jamin, La doctrine, Paris, Dalloz, collection Méthode juridique, 2004). Anyway, the “School of exegesis” has been associated with official representations of legal reasoning, legal methods, and legal studies. These methods, whether they are actually used or finally reconstructed, and considered scientific by some, dogmatic by others, appear as one of the more important foundations of contemporary legal sciences in France, either because they are considered as a model or because they work as a repulsion.

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Droit
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Dates et versions

halshs-03897984 , version 1 (14-12-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Véronique Champeil-Desplats. Methods of Legal Science (France). M.N.S. Sellers; Stephan Kirste. Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Springer Netherlands, pp.1-7, 2023, ⟨10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_732-1⟩. ⟨halshs-03897984⟩
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