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Fostering the Autonomy of Legal Reasoning Through Legal Realism

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Book cover Economics in Legal Reasoning

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Institutions, Economics and Law ((PSIEL))

Abstract

This chapter explains why the dominant pattern of disciplinary interaction between law and economics has fostered a general trend of reducing legal reasoning to economic reasoning. After describing the pattern of interaction between both disciplines through the example of property rights (Sect. 8.2) and linking it to the debate on reductionism in philosophy of science (Sect. 8.3), the chapter proposes a strategy for salvaging the autonomy of legal reasoning by increasing reflexivity through a version of legal realism inspired by the work of Otto Neurath (Sect. 8.4).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It could be argued that this attitude is prevalent among philosophers of science: in their zeal to explain why science has been successful, they easily slip into assuming it has been as successful as it can be.

  2. 2.

    Smith (2019) reaches the same conclusion via a different, but related, argument.

  3. 3.

    See Gómez Pomar (2020).

  4. 4.

    It is important to notice that this is not a thesis about how judges should rule legal cases. This is a separate issue, which depends, first, on the place that consequentialist reasoning has within legal reasoning and, second, on whether economic analysis represents the best model of consequentialist reasoning. Neither of these questions is addressed by the argument offered here. On consequence-based arguments in the context of legally bounded decision-making, see Cserne (2020).

  5. 5.

    The article was cited twice by the US Supreme Court in two major cases restricting fair use: Sony v. Universal (1984) and in the majority of Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985).

  6. 6.

    Of course, legal scholarship is not only about issuing better predictions; it also includes conceptual analysis, critique, justification, systematization, explanation and so forth. The point is rather that issuing better predictions is essential for law to keep its autonomy vis-à-vis the social sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Felipe Figueroa Zimmermann

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  1. Felipe Figueroa Zimmermann
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Correspondence to Felipe Figueroa Zimmermann .

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  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Péter Cserne

  2. Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Fabrizio Esposito

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Figueroa Zimmermann, F. (2020). Fostering the Autonomy of Legal Reasoning Through Legal Realism. In: Cserne, P., Esposito, F. (eds) Economics in Legal Reasoning. Palgrave Studies in Institutions, Economics and Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40168-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40168-9_8

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